Teleporter (a Hyllis family story #2)

by Dahners, Laurence

  However, as far as Daussie knew, nothing could be done about it. Heart in her throat, Daussie suddenly realized that this woman in front of her might die. She glanced at Eva and saw her brow was wrinkled with concern. She had hoped that Eva would know what to do but began to suspect that nothing could be done.

  Eva stepped back, saying, “Excuse us Mrs. Prichard while we talk over what we’ve found. We’ll come back to explain what we found in just a minute.” Eva walked away, the grim look on her face visible even in the lamplight. Daussie followed her feeling more and more dismayed. Eva said, “What did you find?”

  Daussie said, “She’s got gallstones. One of them is blocking the biliary duct system at the ampulla of Vater and backing everything up. It’s making her really sick. That’s a much bigger problem than the pain she’s having.”

  Eva sighed, “And what can we do about it?”

  Daussie wasn’t sure whether the question was only rhetorical so she stopped to ponder. “In the old days they would’ve operated to remove it and taken out the gallbladder,” she mused. “Wait! We could have Tarc push that stone through the ampulla and into the intestine! It wouldn’t cure the gallstones, but it would fix what’s making her so sick right now.”

  Eva turned to look up at Daussie, understanding dawning on her face. “My God! You might be right. I had just about been going to say that there wasn’t anything we could do!” She threw her arms around her daughter, squeezing her tight. “That was pure genius! I’m stuck in my old ways of thinking of things and just didn’t even try to think of what Tarc might be able to do.” She turned and looked at the woman, “If you’ll wake Tarc up I’ll brew a little poppy seed tea.”

  Daussie said, “Poppy seed tea? That won’t help the gallstone.”

  Eva put a hand on Daussie’s shoulder, “No, but it’s going to hurt like hell when Tarc moves that stone. If we get a little poppy seed in her first, it should help.”

  “It’s going to take a while to brew the tea, and a while longer for it to work. Can’t we let Tarc sleep until then?”

  Eva winced, “You’re right. I was thinking that he should learn about gallbladder disease, but he needs his rest if he’s going to be on guard tonight.”

  As they started the tea brewing, Daussie asked, “How are we going to explain bringing Tarc out when we do the… ‘treatment.’”

  “Hmmm, he’s sleeping in the tent right there next to where Mrs. Prichard is lying.” Eva wrinkled her nose and grinned, “Maybe he can move that stone without even getting out of bed!”

  Mr. Prichard arrived an hour or so later, when Mrs. Prichard was quite bleary from the poppy seed tea. He had apparently been stomping around the caravan looking for her and Mrs. Rose had pointed him in the right direction. “What the hell is going on here?! I hear my sick wife is out here waiting for some charlatan to wave a magic rattle and make her better?”

  Looking tense, Eva nonetheless calmly waved toward the trailer, “Yes Mr. Prichard, she’s right over here. She came out hoping we could do something for the pain she’s having in her abdomen.”

  “She’s had those stomach cramps lots of times. She always gets better and she will this time too.”

  “It’s never lasted for an entire day before though, has it? She’s got a gallstone blocking her bile duct and it’s making her very ill. The other episodes were probably also from gallstones, but they were smaller and passed on their own.”

  “That’s bullshit! You can’t possibly know what kind of stones she has inside of her!”

  Eva shrugged and spoke quietly, “This is my business. I can and I do know what kind of stones she has and what kind of trouble they are causing. I think that I can make her better and that if she doesn’t get treatment she’s going to become sicker and sicker. She might even die…” Eva stared him in the eye, “If she doesn’t get better from our treatment, you don’t need to pay us. We don’t charge if we can’t help someone.” Eva looked at Daussie and then flicked her eyes at the tent, hoping Daussie would understand that she wanted her to wake Tarc up.

  Fortunately, Daussie only blinked once then got it. She turned, bent and climbed into the tent.

  Prichard stepped to his wife’s side, staring at her slack face, “What have you done to her?!”

  “Given her some poppy seed tea to ease the pain. Both the pain she was having and the pain she’ll have when we move the stone.”

  “Well, you’d better not have given her too much. You’re right that I won’t pay you if she doesn’t get better, but if she dies of an overdose of poppy seed, I’ll be back with my sword!” He bent over his wife and slid a meaty arm behind her shoulders, starting to sit her up.

  “Wait!” Eva said, “We haven’t moved the stone yet!”

  “Well, if you’re going to do it, you’d better hurry. I’m taking the poor woman home!”

  “Lay her back down for another moment, ‘til we get it done.”

  “No! Shake your rattles and kill your chickens while I’m getting her to her feet here. Have done with it without slowing me down or don’t do it at all.”

  Eva reached out and kicked the side of the tent, hoping that Daussie had Tarc awake and he could hear what was going on. A moment later, Mrs. Prichard shrieked and doubled over grasping at her abdomen.

  Panicked, Prichard laid his wife back down and knelt beside her, “What happened?”

  Eva thought to herself that the man, irritating as he was, obviously loved his wife. She bit back the temptation to tell him he’d hurt his wife himself. Instead she leaned over and touched Mrs. Prichard’s abdomen, sending her ghost in to see what the status of the stone was. With relief, she felt that it was gone out of the duct and lay a few centimeters down the intestine. The distended biliary and pancreatic ducts were already deflating. She looked up at Prichard and said, “It’s okay. The stone’s out of the duct and she should start feeling better in a little bit.”

  In fact, Mrs. Prichard chose that moment to sigh blissfully, reach down and rub her own stomach, then say, “You’re right. The pain’s going!” She mumbled drunkenly, “Thank you so much. I think I’ll go to sleep now.”

  ‘

  As Tarc and Daussie lay in the Hyllises’ tent waiting while Prichard maneuvered his wife up and away, practically carrying her back toward his house, Tarc turned to Daussie. He whispered, “Daussie, can your ghost feel this tiny little pebble just beyond the tip of my finger?”

  “I thought you were trying to sleep so you’d be rested up for your watch tonight?”

  “Yeah, that’s not working so good. Can you feel the pebble? It’s more like a big grain of sand.”

  Daussie expanded her ghost into the darkness, found Tarc’s arm, then finger, then the minuscule rock off the end of his finger. “Yes. What about it?”

  “Try pushing it.”

  Gloomily, Daussie said, “Why are you doing this?! You know I can’t push things.”

  “Maybe you can,” Tarc said tensely. He sounded like he felt pretty excited about whatever he was thinking. “I can push things that are too big for Dad to move. You can sense a bigger area than I can. Maybe you can push but your push is even weaker than Dad’s. Maybe, even if you can’t push a copper, you can push something smaller. It might not help a lot with treating patients, but if you could tug on things inside of people to see if they’re irritable, it could really help with making a diagnosis.”

  Daussie focused on the miniscule rock for a second and thought about trying to move it. Nothing happened. “I can’t do it,” she said mournfully.

  “Oh come on! You didn’t really even try! Focus! Shove that thing!”

  Daussie turned her attention back to the pebble and concentrated.

  Tarc continued exhorting her, “Push it away like it’s a spider! A nasty bug! Move it, move it, move it! Keep focusing… Wha’, what the hell just happened?”

  Daussie wasn’t sure what had happened either. The pebble was gone! She hadn’t sensed it moving, but it must have. She spread the attent
ion of her ghost out, “Um, is that it… there by your elbow”?

  It was dark in the tent, but Daussie could sense Tarc’s sudden shift of attention in the way he altered the position of his head. “Maybe? Maybe it’s just another big piece of sand that we didn’t notice before?” The tiny rock skidded back across the floor of the tent to where the original pebble had been, presumably under the influence of Tarc’s ghost. “Try pushing it again,” Tarc said.

  Again the pebble disappeared. This time, to Daussie, it didn’t feel like much effort was involved at all. The first time she’d had to focus and push, but this time it seemed like she… knew what to do. She cast about near Tarc’s elbow to see if she had simply shoved it to that same location so quickly she didn’t feel it go, but she couldn’t feel it this time.

  Tarc breathed, “It’s gone!” Wonderingly, he said, “I’m not sure if it just disappeared, or if you moved it so fast I couldn’t see it go. What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Daussie said with a sense of awe. “Maybe you were thinking so hard about it that you moved it.”

  “I don’t think so. Let me get another pebble.”

  Daussie expected him to get up, or at least roll over and reach out under the flap of the tent, but he did neither. Suddenly she realized that he was just reaching out with his ghost. Sure enough, a few seconds later an oddly shaped pebble floated in and stopped in the same location the two tiny ones had been before. This one was a little bit bigger and shaped something like a tadpole.

  Tarc said, “This pebble’s weird enough that we won’t be left wondering whether it just disappeared and we found another one. Give it a shove.”

  Daussie said, “It’s too big!”

  “You moved that tiny one so far and so fast we can’t even find it! I’m pretty sure you can move this one a little ways.”

  Daussie reached out and did what she’d done to the tiny one. Nothing seemed to happen for a second, then the tadpole disappeared!

  “Damn!” Tarc exclaimed, jerking himself up onto one elbow. “Where the hell did it go?!” Even though he was rigidly still, Daussie had the impression that he was casting about for it with his ghost. She had just started to reach out with her own ghost when he suddenly said, “Here it is! By my ribs!”

  Daussie sensed the tadpole as Tarc’s ghost scooted it back into the spot it had come from. Because of its distinctive shape she was sure it was the same pebble. “That’s it all right. Um, it has to be moving really fast since we can’t see it go… or maybe, our ghost senses don’t see things that move even a little bit fast? Well, I guess ‘see’ isn’t really the right term for what our ghosts do, but, you know what I mean? Can you see things that are moving quickly with your ghost?”

  “Yeah…” Tarc said slowly and thoughtfully, “I can see my knife flying to a target well enough to control it. It’s going pretty fast.”

  “Are you seeing the pebble move?”

  “Um, no… Maybe my ghost can sense my knife because it was thrown by my hand, but I wouldn’t be able to follow something moved entirely by my ghost?”

  “Oh, that’s a thought. Why don’t you try moving the pebble as fast as you can with your ghost and we’ll see if we can follow it?”

  Daussie had her mind focused on the pebble when it suddenly shot from where it lay, back to where it had been by Tarc’s ribs. It moved quickly and seemed a little bit hard to follow, like something someone had thrown, but she definitely had the impression that her ghost had tracked it. Tarc said, “Could you follow it?”

  Daussie nodded, trusting Tarc to follow the motion of her head with his ghost senses. “Maybe I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t known you were about to move it though. Let me try moving it again with you forewarned. Maybe you’ll be able to follow it. I’m going to try to move it back from where it’s lying, to that spot where it started, okay?”

  “Sure,” Tarc said.

  Daussie focused on the pebble, thinking about how she wanted to move it from the one spot exactly to another spot, rather than just trying to “push it” like she had before. She even pictured it moving slowly. At first, like before, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, the pebble simply was at the new location where Tarc’s finger had originally been.

  Tarc’s head drew back in startlement, “Whoa! It’s like… it just… jumped from the one spot to the other! I don’t have any sense that it’s moving! Just that it disappears in the one place and appears in the next!”

  “Yeah,” Daussie said slowly, “that’s what it feels like to me too. It seems like I have to push on it for a little while, and then suddenly, bang, it’s in the new place. Kind of like I have to push it up over a little lip, then it rolls instantly to the new spot.”

  Tarc said, “But it has to be going from the one place to the other so fast we can’t sense it! Otherwise how would it get there?”

  “Yeah, I think you’ve got to be right. It seems weird that it goes so fast we can’t see it when I do it, but that we can see it when you do it.”

  “Hey!” Tarc said, “Maybe if you were moving something bigger, it would go slow enough that we could see it?” He dug into a pocket.

  “But I can’t move big things!”

  “Maybe you can, now that you’ve learned how. I can move a lot bigger things now than I could when I first started. Try it with this copper,” he said reaching out and putting a copper coin on the ground sheet of their tent.

  It was moderately bigger and substantially heavier than the pebble she’d been moving. Daussie reached out with her ghost, grasped the copper and focused on moving it over by Tarc’s ribs. Nothing happened. “It’s too big,” she sighed, “I can’t move it.”

  “Keep trying! You’ve just got to get it up over that ‘lip’ you were talking about.”

  Daussie resumed shoving it. A second later it vanished, reappearing by Tarc’s ribs!

  “Damn!” Tarc said excitedly, “I still didn’t see it move! Do you feel it going from the one place to the other?”

  “No,” Daussie said slowly. “It seems to me that it just disappears in the one place and reappears in the other. Is that how it seems to you?”

  “Yeah!” But… it’s got to be just moving too fast to see, doesn’t it? Wait, I’ll fold it in my blanket, then when you move it, it’ll pull on the blanket, right?” Tarc said this last musingly, as he tried to consider the ramifications of what seemed to be happening. He’d picked up the copper, put it on the corner of his blanket then folded the blanket around it a couple of times. “There, you can still sense it right?”

  Of course I can, Daussie thought to herself, I can feel things deep inside of you! She didn’t say anything aloud however. Instead she simply focused on the copper as it lay wrapped in the blanket, trying to move it back to the spot on the ground sheet where he’d first placed it. At first nothing happened, just like before, but she continued pushing. Suddenly, the blanket collapsed where the copper had been. The copper appeared out on the ground sheet exactly on the spot where Daussie had been trying to send it.

  “Holy crap!” Tarc breathed. “That’s amazing!” After a moment he said, “You might be able to do a lot better than just pushing a stone out of a bile duct! You might be able to remove stones completely!”

  ***

  When Eva woke her up in the morning, Daussie still felt exhausted. She might not have stood a watch like Tarc did, but she had lain awake for hours thinking about her newfound talent. She wondered what she would be able to do with it. Would she really be able to remove gallstones?

  She decided that before she tried it in a patient, she should try wrapping a pebble in some meat and seeing if she could extract it without harm to the surrounding flesh. After a while, she wondered whether any animals might have real gallstones that she could practice on. Her eyebrows rose, or kidney stones? Wait a minute, chickens! They have pebbles in their gizzards! If I can remove them without hurting the chicken, that would be relatively good proof that it could be done without harm. She pause
d, thinking for a moment, and I can swallow a pebble and remove it from my own stomach!

  Still, she felt disheartened. Removing stones from patients would certainly be very helpful to those few patients who had stones, but gallstones and kidney stones only made up a small portion of the very, very many things that could go wrong with patients. Tarc could help a lot more people than she could.

  They didn’t actually cook breakfast for the camp that morning. Even though they got up early so that they would be able to do it, Norton came around minutes after they had risen. He exhorted the people in each wagon to get up, eat some of their traveling food, hitch their teams and be ready to leave as soon as possible. He was apparently following the suggestion that they try to get out of this part of the country before the bandits realized they were there.

  Even though the Hyllises knew that, with the scouts watching them, it was pointless to try to leave before the raiders noticed, they rushed to get ready as if they were unaware. During his time on guard, Tarc had seen a couple of scouts come out of the woods where the one man had been standing. They had circled somewhat near the caravan, never coming close enough that Tarc thought he should roust the rest of the guard. Nonetheless, the raiders certainly knew of the caravan’s presence and exactly where it was located.

  Despite being awake and hurrying as fast as they could, the Hyllises were the last ones to be ready to roll. All the other wagon owners had a great deal more experience with the preparations necessary to move out. Once the caravan had started to move, Eva called Daussie over to the back of their wagon. For a moment she studied her surprisingly attractive young daughter. Considering that the girl never made an effort to look better, it was amazing how good she looked. Daussie hadn’t even asked to have her irregularly chopped hair cut any nicer after Krait’s men had been driven away. The hair still looked like someone had hacked it off with a rock but Daussie had combed it out straight and somehow it looked good. She looked good enough that Eva could imagine some thinking she’d cut her hair that way as a style choice. Eva sighed, keeping the boys away from her daughter was going to be difficult just like Tarc had suggested.