Nest of Worlds (15 page)

First thing in the morning, they began prepping him for the radio tomography. This time the cart that Aurelia brought in was electric. She gave him an injection. She was the youngest nurse. Efficient and calm, she had a sweet though empty face, short gray hair, a bulbous nose, and a voice that was too high.

Her face widened, then narrowed, and the black bands on her nurse’s cap rippled.

“I feel like I’m on a turntable,” he said.

“I administered a sedative, to put you in a better mood. Dr. Barth’s orders.”

“Then let’s be off. Dr. Throzz’s orders are a ride down the hall, wheels first and the rear bringing up the rear.”

“It will pass in a minute. You’ll just be sleepy.”

In the radio tomography room, even the usual cold that came from the white tiles was not unpleasant. The smells were different here, not hospital smells: high-tech, electronic. The main piece of furniture in the room was the two-meter torus of the electromagnet, with an impressive console whose various indicators, monitors, and lights winked cheerfully at Gavein.

Behind a desk stood a man in a white coat buttoned in the back. He squinted over his glasses. He had a big head.

“Please move yourself onto this,” he said, pointing to a gurney that could be wheeled inside the magnet.

Gavein obediently rolled from one cart to the other. He was getting out of shape, he felt, from not enough activity. But the DS hospital’s rules didn’t allow exercise. A technician held the probe, which was encased in plastic insulation and connected by cable to the machine. Gavein looked out a window and saw a row of faces observing him through the glass. The faces were formed from the parts of the window frame, from the clouds, but sometimes they simply swam out of the blue sky. The moment he thought of the sky as blue, it began to change. Briefly, it was a blue bird that looked in at him.

Dr. Barth appeared. Gavein had never liked that sly face and slimy manner. The face seemed twice as sly now, the manner twice as slimy. When Aurelia breathed in, her bosom moved forward and her bottom retreated; when she breathed out, those parts of the body returned to their proper places.

“How is it going, Lee?” asked Dr. Barth.

“Fine. I’m upping the transformer so we can see fifteen centimeters inside.”

“When do we begin? I want to call Siskin.”

“In a few minutes.”

Dr. Barth picked up the receiver, but something peculiar happened to Lee: He yelled, then he was flapping like a fish out of water. He was trying to say something but was unable to, because his jaw chattered in syncopation. Dr. Barth shouted something into the phone, Aurelia stood frozen in place, and Gavein watched as one watches actors on a stage. He wanted to applaud and cry, “Encore!” Lee, jerking, slid from the chair to the floor and kept jerking. Aurelia screamed that she couldn’t disconnect the machine, while Dr. Barth screamed that she shouldn’t touch Lee. Birds looked in through the window off and on. Some of them gave Gavein a knowing nod. After a time, strange people wearing green uniforms came in. Gavein dozed off as Nurse Nylund carted him back to his room. He wondered as he fell asleep why Aurelia wasn’t pushing him.

Later he learned that all these things had actually happened. Lee had been electrocuted by a high-tension line, failing to notice the break in the plastic around the probe. His hand grasped the spot, and he received the current for several minutes. With an alternating current that changed polarity several times a second in irregular intervals, his heart didn’t have a chance.

Weak aftershocks continued over the next two days. The rift widened. A temporary bridge of aluminum was thrown up across it. Study was renewed on the David Throzz Effect, the name now given to the phenomenon of correlated deaths. It was admitted that so far all attempts to explain the effect had failed dismally. Only Colonel Medved’s group had anything to show for its labor: the fact that for every death in Davabel there was either an “unquestionable” or “highly probable” connection to the person of Gavein. The tally every day showed zero in all other columns, and the total grew.

Gavein was not permitted to call Ra Mahleiné again. The deal he had made with the DS was for one conversation only. There should not have been this delay. Saalstein, Ezzir, and even Dr. Barth assured him that telephone contact was made with his wife every day and that she was all right. Because the investigation into the murders of Zef and Laila was ongoing, the content of their conversations with Ra Mahleiné had to be kept secret. Gavein didn’t believe them but didn’t argue. He waited. He had been at the Division of Science three weeks now.

They’ll slice me open like a pig for the good of humanity, he thought. The surgery would reveal nothing, he was sure.

Siskin promised that the incisions would heal in two weeks, so the prospect of going home was not that distant. The radio tomography was abandoned: no one could be found to administer it.

In the company of Saalstein and Dr. Barth, Gavein ate a full and delicious breakfast. Dr. Barth personally took his blood pressure, asked him how he felt. All three of them knew that the DS had been getting nowhere. Gavein expressed surprise that they were allowing him to eat before the operation. Dr. Barth said that they would not be entering his stomach or intestines, so food was not counterindicated. He would have no appetite afterward, so why not stock up now? Gavein asked that Ra Mahleiné not be called until after his operation. Saalstein said he would see to that.

That afternoon Aurelia took him to the hospital shower. He went on foot, barefoot, because they wanted him to exert himself a little. Perhaps to reduce the chance of his getting a hospital infection. Unfortunately Aurelia hadn’t brought slippers. He left his blue hospital gown in the dressing room and proceeded to the preoperation room. They would be opening him up in several places. A kind of autopsy, except that he would be living through it. After he laid down on the gurney and was covered with a sheet, Aurelia came back and gave him an injection.

Doped up and defenseless again, he thought bitterly. A humiliating ritual.

“Another sedative?” he asked.

“That’s given in your rear end, in the muscle,” she answered with a smile. “This goes directly in the vein. Dr. Barth’s orders.”

Dr. Barth himself came in, with Siskin, several doctors Gavein didn’t know, Saalstein, Ezzir, and even General Thompson.

What do they think to find inside me, the sons of bitches? he thought. It’s in his hand, not in his vital organs, that Death holds the scythe.

“He received the medication?” asked Dr. Barth.

Aurelia nodded.

“Excellent. Let us begin.”

Nylund wheeled in a cart that held a row of ampules and vials.

“Where is Boggs?” asked Thompson. “He wanted to be here too.”

“I told his secretary,” said Dr. Barth. “He’ll be here any minute.”

Someone fixed a basket of encephalograph wires into position over Gavein’s head, and someone else attached EKG electrodes to him.

Dr. Barth prepared another injection. “You left the needle in the vein?” he asked the nurse.

She said yes.

“What’s this?” asked Siskin.

“The first dose. In five minutes I give the next. After another five, the last.”

Slowly he pressed the contents of the syringe into Gavein’s vein. The monitor that recorded Gavein’s life signs started beeping quietly.

Gavein grew lighter, brighter somehow. His surroundings took on color, and things weaved even more than they had with the sedative. Dr. Barth’s nose increased to ludicrous proportions. Thompson’s meaty face gleamed pink and more and more resembled the snout of a pig. Gavein looked at Siskin: the man’s thin face was surrounded by a halo of flame. Making a great effort, Gavein saw that it was only the man’s red hair. By straining his mind and focusing, he could reduce the hallucinations.

“Where are the notes?” Bogg’s voice rang like a bell.

The answer didn’t reach Gavein’s ears.

“The next dose now,” said Dr. Barth, turning to Siskin. As he spoke, his tongue touched and moved the end of his extremely long nose, from left to right and back. Aurelia spread the white wings of her lab coat and took to the air, floating where the wall met the ceiling. The windows expanded and contracted, having assumed the outline of a woman’s lips. The curtains reminded Gavein of Ra Mahleiné’s uneven teeth. He looked more carefully at the fluttering figure in white and found that it wasn’t Aurelia at all but his wife. Ra Mahleiné looked good in a white dress and wings. Gavein felt Dr. Barth tugging with his fingers at a vein. No doubt the physician wanted to stick his nose in, to smell out the secret of why only those who had crossed the path of David Death died.

“He’s received the second dose. Everything is proceeding according to plan. I told you that this was the only way.”

Near the ceiling Gavein saw a dark shape beside Ra Mahleiné. He couldn’t focus on it. Finally he focused. It was himself floating next to her. He was in a black fake-leather jumpsuit with skulls embroidered on it. Each skull had glittering red gems for eyes. On the back of the jacket was the biggest skull, silver, and beneath it two crossed bones.

If I’m looking at myself from the front, how can I see what’s on my back? he wondered.

“His pulse is up, but the responses are all normal.”

His pulse was a small chubby cupid flitting about the room, faster and faster. From Ra Mahleiné’s eyes came yellow sunbeams. Gold in her eyes, he thought, means she’s angry.

“Stop breathing in so greedily, there won’t be air for others,” Ra Mahleiné barked. She was indeed furious. “Washing yourself in the shower, you splashed so much, I couldn’t sleep. You could have done it more quietly.”

Wilcox rushed past, all gray. And bent curiously, like a stork.

“Be careful he doesn’t suck out your veins,” Ra Mahleiné warned. “He’s collecting blood for Brenda, because she slit her wrists and it all came out.”

Wilcox straightened. He was extraordinarily tall and so wide he took up half the room. His face was like a piece of rumpled cloth, the eyes, nose, and mouth painted on.

“I think he’s still conscious,” Wilcox said. “He reacts to light.”

“Yes, senator,” said Dr. Barth, and with his tongue moved the tip of his nose from his left ear to his right. “But after the third dose now, he’ll sleep.”

A turtle rode around the room. On its shell stood little vials of alcohol and fluids: yellow, clear, and reddish. The shell was flat, the legs high, the feet wheels.

“Just don’t go and get a chill,” said Ra Mahleiné, shaking a finger. “They hardly covered you with a sheet.”

Wilcox sucked the blood from his vein.

If it’s for Brenda, Gavein thought, then I guess he can have a little.

Wilcox wiped his mouth with a sleeve and tied the vein in a looped knot.

“And after the third dose?” asked Siskin, whose head bounced on a spring as he looked at Gavein from a height.

The room pulsed and gave off rainbow rings. Inside the rings, as inside the frame of a painting, were Ra Mahleiné, Wilcox, himself in the black jumpsuit, Dr. Barth, Siskin, Thompson, and a white turtle with a cylindrical head.

“The pupils no longer react. He must be out.”

“This time, finally, we should succeed,” stated a hog in the voice of General Thompson. “So much effort, so many victims.”

“His field is narrowing now. When the body is completely without feeling, we give the gas,” hissed Dr. Barth.

“What is his Significant Name?” asked Wilcox. “
Yacrod
?
Myzzt
?”

“
Aeriel
.”

“So, then, there won’t be an operation?” Wilcox asked further, in the voice of Boggs.

It seemed to Gavein that he was a television set, showing all the action but unable to act himself.

“The autopsy,” said Dr. Barth with a grim chuckle, “will be very thorough.”

Gavein saw him through a thickening cloud and couldn’t tell if the man was still moving his nose from ear to ear.

“If he survives the gas, it will be a vivisection, not an autopsy.”

“That should take care of him, senator,” Siskin said. “We’ll leave the organs out, in the air, because he’s an
Aeriel
. To make sure he doesn’t come back.”

“What about his wife?” asked Wilcox.

“Still alive.”

“Is she Death too?”

“We’re not sure. Probably not, since she has cancer.”

The voices were coming from inside Gavein’s skull. They grew softer. It was harder for him to distinguish among the speakers. Only he, in the black jacket, said nothing. It was harder also to form thoughts. The gray mist before his eyes spread like mold. He felt no pain. His field of vision was the diameter of the face of a watch, and all the figures in it were dwindling. Soon it resembled a small metal ball, blinking with different colors as it hung in the darkness of outer space.

The ball began to rotate. To jump in all directions. Gavein felt a sharp, deepening pain. The ball meanwhile had floated away, far away. He lost consciousness.

When he woke, it was to two torments: the ache throughout his body and an awful tedium. He threw up once, twice, three times. There was nothing left to bring up, but his stomach muscles still spasmed. His heart hammered wildly. Then he drifted back into oblivion.

When he came to again, it was cold. He moved. He was partly covered with something, battered, naked. Vomit stank around him, but another smell bored into his nostrils. His eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and he saw it wasn’t completely dark. It was surprisingly easy to move his head. He brushed rubble from it, raising a cloud of dust, which made him sneeze several times. He tried changing position, but a thousand edges, corners, and the dust itself all began to claw at his skin.

He freed his left arm first. Slowly, methodically, he removed stone after stone, brick fragment after brick fragment. He was badly bruised but, in all the rubble and dust, had apparently sustained no serious injury. He dug himself out with new energy. It was hardest to extricate his right leg from under the gurney, which was locked in place by the mound of rubble. He wriggled out from under the mound carefully, so it wouldn’t fall on him.

He tried to stand, but the ceiling was too low. Everything had a mysterious cast to it because of the red glow. The acrid smell of sulfur burned his nose. A deafening roar—it came from outside, not from within his head. He felt his body all over: the sore places, the innumerable scrapes and bruises. There was dull pain at the touch, but no more. Moving did not present a problem. He was caked with sweat and brick powder. He was afraid to take a step, not wanting to cut his feet on the broken glass that was everywhere. The floor had risen, in defiance of the horizontal, and somewhere in the darkness it met with the ceiling. The operating room looked as if a giant had knocked it over for a joke and then stepped on it, crushing one of the walls.

Soon it became light enough for Gavein to see the flooring and avoid the glass. It was warmer now, perhaps because of his exertion. He climbed the slope of the floor toward a dark opening, a door visible at the top. Unfortunately, it led only to the dressing room. At least he found some clothes. He beat the dust from them, wiped his face with some rag or towel, and put on a hospital outfit; the uniform of the DS staff. The hospital slippers were rather light, but he could find nothing better. Through them his feet unpleasantly felt the larger fragments. The second door was blocked, so he returned to the operating room.

The roar had increased. He approached the gaping air beyond the collapsed wall. The sun was coming up, and the roar now intensified in waves. He would have to find another exit. The vibration in the floor alarmed him. This damaged building could crumble at any moment.

He noticed a hand jutting from the rubble. It took him a moment or two to uncover some of Nylund’s body. The nurse had had no luck: her head was flattened by a section of wall.

Gavein had been more fortunate. The operating table and the overturned gurney together had shielded him from the falling wall, and then all that slid onto him were stones and bricks.

He groped his way around the room, looking for an exit. The floor began to sway. He needed to leave this precarious ruin immediately.