by Pete Hautman
“Ten days?” Ten was the number of fingers on her hands.
“You have been unconscious.”
“You said there were others who were injured. Who are they?”
“The ones called Beetha, Oro, and Argent. The Yar called Jonis was here with a broken ankle, but I have discharged her.”
“And everyone else was okay?”
“Several people died, I have been told. The priests have fled the city.”
“What of Yar Song?”
“Which is she?”
“One of her eyelids is tattooed.”
“Oh. That one. She lives.” Severs consulted her device. “That is enough talking. You must rest.” She reached behind Lia’s neck and activated the nerve jammer. All sensation went away. Severs extinguished the lamp.
The next time she awakened, Lia could see a bar of sunlight slipping in past the edges of a shuttered window. She tried to call out. Her lungs were working, but she could only make a wheezy, hissing sound, barely audible over the constant roar in her ears. She watched a beetle, oblivious of gravity, making its way across the plaster ceiling. She watched the beetle for a very long time.
The sound of footsteps came from outside the room, then the click of a door latch. A moment later, the blank-faced Severs put her hand behind Lia’s neck and turned off the jammer. Sensation returned. Lia’s arm shot out, grasped Severs’s wrist, and squeezed. Severs let out a squawk and tried to wrestle her arm from Lia’s grip. Lia threw back her covers and started to sit up, but the tingling in her face instantly became a ripping, searing, unbearable pain, and her chest felt as if it had shattered. She gasped and fell back onto the mattress. The room spun. Bubbles of blackness crowded her vision.
Then, suddenly, the pain was gone, and she was once again looking at Severs’s face.
“Why did you do that?” Severs asked.
Lia was not able to answer. The nerve jammer had been reactivated.
Severs placed her tricorder on Lia’s chest. “Heart rate elevated. Minor new trauma to ribcage. No serious new damage. That was very foolish. You are being kept immobile for a reason — to give your body time to heal.” She finished her examination. “I am going to deactivate the jammer again. I want you to lie perfectly still. Can you do that?”
Lia blinked once. Severs turned off the jammer. Sensation flooded Lia’s body. The tingling in her face and the aching in her ribs were worse than before, but not unbearable.
“Please do not turn it on again,” Lia said, struggling to keep her voice calm.
“Why not? It will be more comfortable for you.”
“I prefer the discomfort.”
“Pain does not promote healing.”
“Feeling nothing is worse,” Lia said.
Severs made a note on her tricorder.
“Are you a Medicant?” Lia asked.
“Yes.”
“How can that be?” As far as Lia knew, the Medicants were extinct — the last of them had been killed or driven off many generations ago.
“I arrived here through a disko,” Severs said.
Disko. That was what the Boggsian Artur had called the Gates.
“What happened on the pyramid? You said several were killed.”
“So I have been told.”
“Told by who?”
“The Yar with the scarred face.”
“Hidalgo.”
“Yes, Hidalgo. She now styles herself the leader of the Council of Yars.” Severs looked away. “Her face could be repaired in Mayo.”
“You are from Mayo?”
“Yes.”
“I was there.”
Severs’s eyes widened. It was the most expression Lia had seen from her. “When?” she asked.
“I don’t know. They were building the pyramid.”
“The Cydonian Pyramid was under construction for nearly four hundred years,” Severs said. “It was abandoned and restarted five times.”
“It was nearly complete. . . .” Lia felt as if the room were starting to spin again. “There was a Gate.”
“The pyramid was completed in the year twenty-three seventy-three, ten years before I was born. . . . Are you in pain?”
Lia was gripping the edges of the mattress; the bed seemed to be swaying. She opened her eyes. The ceiling was spinning. She closed her eyes again. “Your numbers are whirling my brain.”
“It is not the numbers that are causing your vertigo. You have been concussed. The dizziness will pass.” She placed a hand on Lia’s arm. “Open your eyes. Look at me.”
Lia did so. Severs’s features swam into focus. The spinning stopped.
“Better?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still hear the waterfall?”
The sound in her ears had subsided to a soft buzz.
“It is better now.”
“I will answer one more question, then you must rest.”
Lia took a breath and prepared herself to hear the worst. “What exactly happened to me?”
“Facial trauma associated with an encounter with a sharp instrument,” Severs said, speaking in a dispassionate monotone. “A knife, I am told. The blade shattered your zygomatic bone, severed your orbicularis, and seriously damaged your zygomaticus muscle.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Lia said.
“When you arrived here, your lower eyelid was inverted. Your teeth and jawbone were visible through an opening in your cheek.”
Lia swallowed and closed her eye, fighting off a wave of nausea. Severs touched a small penlike device to Lia’s arm. “You also suffered a concussion from the explosion, and there is a second knife wound, a twenty-four-centimeter laceration on your left torso, which damaged several ribs. Fortunately, all of your parts are present and repairable. You should regain one-hundred-percent functionality.”
“I will have both eyes?”
“The eyeball itself is undamaged.”
The air in the room seemed to thicken; Lia felt as if she were sinking into the mattress.
“What is happening? Why am I so tired?”
“I have given you a sedative.”
Lia wanted to be angry with Severs, but she could not summon the emotion. All she wanted was to sleep.
“Am I going to be ugly like Yar Hidalgo?” she managed to say.
“Tomorrow I will remove your dressing,” Severs said. “Then we will know more.”
THE NEXT MORNING, LIA WAS ABLE TO SIT UP.
“Slowly,” said Severs, one hand on Lia’s back. Her ribs felt crunchy. Her face was a tingling slab of meat.
“Are you experiencing pain?” Severs asked.
“No,” Lia said. It did hurt, but not unbearably. The noise in her ears had diminished to a distant drone, like dogs growling outside the window.
“I am going to remove your dressing now.”
Lia braced herself for the worst as Severs used a plastic blade to loosen the adhesive, but there was only a slight discomfort as the Medicant gently lifted away the dressing. Lia was surprised to see that it was a light, almost transparent half mask. Severs examined her face intently, then nodded.
“You are healing well. Would you like to see?”
Lia took a deep breath. “Show me.”
Severs held up her tricorder and dragged a finger along the edge. The screen became a mirror. Lia stared into the image of her own face. Or rather, into what was left of it.
The left side of her face was a ruin. A huge blue-green bruise surrounded her closed eye, her nose was grotesquely swollen, and a purple tear, like a jagged lightning bolt, zigzagged from the corner of her eye and through her cheek, ending at the base of her jaw.
She almost passed out. Severs grabbed her arm to support her.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m a monster,” Lia rasped.
“The swelling should be gone in a few days. The bruising will fade.”
“I can’t open my eye.”
“Your eye is cemented shut. Here . . .” Severs ra
n a pencil-like device along the margin of Lia’s eyelid. “Try now.”
Her left eyelid popped open.
“Let me see myself again.”
Severs held up the tricorder and activated the mirror. Lia forced herself to examine her face closely. The white of her left eye was bright red with blood.
“My eye . . .”
“The blood in your sclera will clear.”
Lia forced herself to breathe and tried to imagine how it would look without the bruising and swelling.
“I will have a scar,” she said, her voice wooden.
“I am limited by the equipment available to me,” Severs said. “If we were in Mayo, we could erase it completely. This is not Mayo.”
Lia looked at Severs’s bland, unscarred, expressionless face.
“Why did you come here?” Lia asked.
“I had little choice.” She held up a hand. “No more questions. You must rest.”
The following day, Severs allowed Lia to visit her fellow patients. Oro was still comatose; his head was completely covered with a plastic dressing like the one Lia had worn.
“He has a severe concussion and burns over seventeen percent of his body,” Severs said. “Your priests would say he is in the hands of the gods.”
Argent, his broken jaw wired shut, could move only his eyes — Severs told Lia she was keeping him immobile with her nerve jammer. “He is not happy about that,” she said.
Beetha was also confined to her bed, with a broken hip, but she could talk.
“Yar Lia,” she said, “you are looking . . . I will not say well, though I see you are walking, which is more than I can do.”
“You will recover,” said Severs.
“I will, yes. I wish that the same could be said of my eldest son. We have paid a large price, but at least the priests are gone. My only regret is that many of them escaped.”
“I remember little of what happened,” Lia said.
Severs said, “Short-term memory loss is common with head trauma.”
“You saved us, Yar Lia,” Beetha said.
“I did?”
“You triggered the explosives.”
Lia shook her head, seeing fragments of images: Master Gheen coming at her with a knife, Oro swinging his steel bar, Beetha fumbling with her detonator . . .
“The detonator wasn’t working,” Beetha said. “As I had feared, the signal was too weak. But before I could get close to the stairwell, I was knocked off the frustum. I dropped the detonator. My hip was broken. I couldn’t move. I thought all was lost, but then a blood-soaked angel of death took up that detonator and did what had to be done. I did not even recognize you, not until later, when Inge and her archers carried us off the pyramid.”
“Inge was there?” Lia remembered the arrows.
“Did you think your mother would not want to protect you?”
“But . . . she said the priests would never leave by the Gate.”
“She must have changed her mind. Even then, if you hadn’t set off the explosives, we would have been overcome. There were a dozen more priests and deacons coming up those stairs. They died as one.”
Lia heard the words come from Beetha’s smiling face. Her entire body went prickly with horror. She knew how many a dozen was — a carton of eggs. She had killed a carton of men. More.
“I didn’t want . . .” Her legs turned to jelly; Severs caught her as she sagged.
“If you hadn’t killed them, we would all be dead.” Beetha’s voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. Lia tried to answer her, but no sound came from her mouth. She was aware that Severs was holding her up, speaking sharply to Beetha, and moving her toward the doorway. She let herself be guided back to her room.
“Did you drug me again?” she managed to ask.
“I did not,” Severs said as she lowered Lia onto her bed. “You are experiencing regret. I have no drugs for that.”
“Why do I regret doing what had to be done?” Lia asked, staring miserably up at the slatted ceiling, half wishing she were dead herself.
“It is an emotional response,” Severs said. “There is no logic to it, but it is unavoidable.”
“None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for me. I was the one who sent Tucker Feye into the Gate. If he hadn’t shown up on the pyramid on my blood moon, everything would have happened differently.”
Severs said, “I do not know who this Tucker Feye is, but I do know you cannot change the past.”
“You can’t know that,” Lia said.
Severs thought for a moment, then said, “Even if you could go back and change what you did, you could not know that it would produce a better result. And if you did change the past, then you would have no reason to have changed it in the first place. The concepts are antithetical.” Severs closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to grow smaller. “Still, I would go back if I could.”
“What is stopping you? There is still a Gate.”
“Yar Hidalgo would no more let me use that Gate than she would a priest.”
“Why?”
Severs’s normally expressionless face darkened. “You will have to ask her. She will be here soon.”
A short time later, Severs led Yar Hidalgo into Lia’s room. Hidalgo’s face looked worse than ever, but Lia forced herself to look at her directly. It was not as difficult as looking at her own reflection.
“Do not stay long,” Severs told Hidalgo. “She needs her rest.” Severs left the room, but Lia had the sense that she did not go far.
“I am pleased to see you are healing, Yar Lia,” Hidalgo said. “The Medicant is capable.”
“She does not care for you,” Lia said.
Hidalgo sat down on the chair beside Lia’s bed. “Why should she care for me? She is my prisoner. The Medicant wants to enter the Gate in hopes of returning home. We need her here for now. Perhaps in the future she will be permitted to leave. For now, there is too much at stake. Treating your injuries, for example, takes precedence over the wishes of a Medicant.”
“Have you seen Yar Song?”
“Song has withdrawn from the Council. She sees no one.”
“And you are in charge now?”
“Romelas needs governing. Too many of our fine citizens see the priests’ departure as license to steal or otherwise abuse their new freedoms. For now, I speak for the Council of Yars.”
“Then it is true? The priests are gone?”
“There are no priests or deacons remaining in the temple. Many were killed on the pyramid, as you well know. However, Master Gheen and at least a hand of others — including one temple girl — escaped through the Gate. Several deacons and acolytes have fled Romelas, along with the landowners who ran the slave farms. We will find them, one by one, and they will be dealt with.” The coldness in Hidalgo’s voice carried a deadly implication.
“Dealt with how?” Lia asked.
“They will be taken to the pyramid and executed.”
Lia could hardly believe what she was hearing.
“You do not approve?” Hidalgo regarded her with wry amusement. “How many Pure Girls have they killed? Their continued existence would only lead to further disruption, and we do not have the resources to watch over them. Our responsibility is to restore order to Romelas.”
“So the Yars are taking over for the priests?”
“Someone must rule.” Hidalgo’s tired eyes glittered. “Better us than the priests, or the merchants, or the landowners. As for the public executions, the people of Romelas need their bread, yes, but they must also have their circuses. When you have recovered your strength you will join us, of course.”
Lia forced herself to remain expressionless. It seemed to her that Hidalgo and her council were no better than the priests.
“I may wish to leave Romelas,” she said.
“Where would you go?”
“Into the Gate.”
“You would follow the priests?”
“I would search for my friend.”
Hidalgo gave Lia a long measuring look. She said, “Song told me of a boy.”
“He is not just a boy. He is Tucker Feye.”
Hidalgo drew back. “Tuckerfeye? Tuckerfeye is a story from the Book.”
“This Tucker Feye is real. Whether he is the Tuckerfeye from the book, I do not know. But he is my friend, and I may have sent him to his death.”
Hidalgo nodded slowly. “I know how you must feel. It is a terrible thing to ask a friend to die. I have done the same, even more recently. But the boy — Tuckerfeye or not — is gone. Your place is here, in Romelas. We cannot resurrect the dead.”
“He died because of me. I may be able to undo what I did.”
“By using the Gate? I think not. You are needed here. We have much work to do.”
“Are you saying that I, too, am a prisoner?”
“You are a prisoner of your destiny. As was the boy. As are we all.”
“Perhaps my destiny lies elsewhere.”
“Impossible to say,” said Hidalgo. “I know only that you are a Yar, and we have need of Yars.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Lia said.
“Really?” Hidalgo smiled. “A pity. You are so good at it.”
After Hidalgo left, Severs entered Lia’s room and stood silently, waiting for Lia to speak.
“Hidalgo says you are her prisoner,” Lia said.
Severs nodded. “I cannot leave.”
“Why did you come here in the first place?”
“I was on the roof of Mayo One when the building was bombed by zealots calling themselves Lambs. The hospital was in flames. The only way I could save myself was to flee through a disko. Fortunately, I was able to bring my tricorder and a few other items with me. I arrived here, on the pyramid, and was taken by the Yars. They told me that this city — Romelas — is in fact Mayo. It is all that is left of our once-great city. If that is true, it is tragic.”
Lia said, “According to The Book of September, Romelas was born after the Medicant city was destroyed by Plague and storms.”
“Mayo was destroyed by bombs and religious fanatics. There is no such thing as Plague.”
