The Memory of Water Page 5
Nada blinked at me. Her eyes narrowed. “You should share water before you leave,” she said. “You are in need of it.”
“It is very hot,” I agreed. “Thank you, that would be nice.” It wasn’t a lie. The water really was good.
Nada raised her hand out of the water. In it was a chipped china teacup, with faded roses painted on the side and a gold rim long turned to black. She held it out to me. Neither her hand nor the cup dripped.
Nor did Miurenn drip when he stood upon the surface of the water.
But then, we humans do not drip air when we move through it, either.
I guzzled the small cup of water as if it was the very best tea in the world. It was better than that, though. I handed the cup back to Nada. “Thank you, both of you,” I told them. “Enjoy the heat.”
“What heat?” Miurenn asked, then grinned and did a back flip and dived into the water. He cut through the surface without a splash and disappeared.
Nada rose to her feet and removed her teeshirt. I averted my eyes, for Nada was not covered in scales as Miurenn was. I moved back onto the land and heard the splashless, soft sound of her dive. When I looked back, she was gone. A small pile of denim and teeshirt jersey sat upon the pier.
I made my way back to my tent, which was on the far opposite side of the camp from Miurenn’s pier. This time, I took the shorter route, which also avoided the quadrangle at the front entrance. My body was heavy with pain by the time I reached it.
I took care of the ache the usual way, then took my towel and fresh clothing to the open-air showers on this side of the camp. There were discrete cubicles inside the corrugated iron enclosure, but the structure had no roof. The water ran through pipes exposed to sunlight. Even at eight in the morning, there was no need to use the solar-heated hot water tap. The cold water was soothingly warm all by itself. I let it beat against my back, as the aching subsided.
By the time I returned my damp towel to the tent, I could feel the first stirrings of hunger. It had been a while since I had eaten. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last thing I ate, or when that had been.
There was a dryad was sitting on the edge of the roof of my tent, her wings beating slowly as she kept herself balanced. I sought my memory for her name. “You’re waiting for me, Kristie?”
She floated to the ground, not smiling. “Suzuki says you must come, Dr. Jones.”
“What has happened?” Although I already suspected why Suzuki had sent for me. Schroeder’s condition must have changed.
So it was a shock when Kristie said sadly, “Another has entered active phase, Dr. Jones.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I slowed from running to a fast walk as I passed through the ward. Old habits die hard. One didn’t run in a hospital. It tended to scare patients.
One of the cots now had blankets strung up around it for privacy. That would be where Schroeder had been transferred.
The surgery seemed to be full of people. One of them was a goblyn. His black hide sucked up all the light in the room.
Suzuki worked on the patient on the bed, her back to me. The three aides were back—that was a surprise. They spread around the bed, watching Suzuki for cues.
I stepped into the room and turned to the goblyn, who stood in the corner made by the light stand and the spectrometer. “You. Out.”
The goblyn had his hands together, up by his lips. He said over them. “But doctor…my daughter…!”
My heart sank as I turned to look at the patient on the bed. Now I was at the foot of the bed, I saw her properly for the first time.
She was just a child. Maybe nine. Black hair, white skin—not the translucent white of a water leaper, but Celtic pale. Human pale.
I hadn’t braced myself for this. Helping children through the active phase, with our inadequate medicine and ignorance, was far harder.
The girl wasn’t yet writhing but I could see it wouldn’t be long before she did. I turned back to the goblyn. “What is her name?”
“Elizabeth,” he said, his gaze upon her. “Elizabeth Miller.”
He had been a Miller once, then.
Elizabeth opened her eyes as he spoke and looked around with a glazed expression. “Daddy?”
My chest ached.
“I’m here, sweetheart,” the goblyn replied, reaching out toward her, even though he couldn’t hope to reach her from here.
At his movement, a musky odor washed over me.
One of the aides gagged and staggered back from the bed. Suzuki gave a soft moan and covered her mouth and nose with one hand, while holding the stethoscope against Elizabeth’s chest with the other.
The goblyn lowered his arm. “I’m sorry. It’s the sun. The heat…”
I nodded. “What is your name?”
“Ketill,” he said, his voice small. “Ketill of California.”
His North American accent had already told me which continent he was from originally. I nodded. “Very well. Ketill, I’m sorry, but you cannot stay in here.”
“I won’t move an inch,” he pleaded.
“No, it’s not that…it’s not just that. You don’t remember your phase shift, and that’s actually a kindness. I don’t want you to watch your daughter go through this. Do you understand? It is important that you understand that, because if you don’t leave, I will have to make you.”
The last thing I wanted was another tripping hazard in here. It was about to get frantic.
All human emotion dropped from Ketill’s face for a moment. A confidence replaced it. A knowledge of his own agency. “You really think you could make me?” he said softly.
“He could,” Suzuki said, her gaze on her patient. “I’ve seen him do it. First he’ll drop you to the ground, then he’ll drag you out of here. And if he doesn’t do it, I will.” She swiveled her gaze to Ketill. That pure green stare unnerved most people.
“Daddy?” Elizabeth called again, her hand out, as if she was searching for him.
Ketill forgot everything but his daughter. He lurched toward her. I got my arm up, barring him.
“Daddy’s waiting for you, little one,” Suzuki told Elizabeth, her tone gentle. “You’ll see him when you wake.”
Elizabeth’s arm dropped. “I’m tired,” she said querulously.
Suzuki jerked her head at me. I look down at Ketill. “Am I dragging you out of here?” I asked softly. “She might hear that,” I added. It was an inducement I knew would reach through to him.
Ketill slumped and stepped back away from me. “I’ll go,” he whispered. “Please…please, can someone come and find me when…if…after?” His red-rimmed eyes met mine. Goblyns always acquired black irises, afterwards, and they were very slightly elongated, vertically.
I saw nothing but a father’s agony, though. “The moment there is news, I’ll have someone come for you.”
Ketill considered me for a very long moment, his gaze moving over my face, measuring me. Then he nodded and moved out of the room. His squat, solid shape trudged stolidly through the ward. He ducked under the blankets, letting in a blast of mid-morning light, and was gone.
I turned back to the bed and rolled up my sleeves both physically and mentally.
•
THE FIRST TUTU VICTIM TO go through the active phase was one of mine. James Benson had recovered from the Tutu virus without trouble, as so many people around the world did. As his GP, I kept him in the clinic during the first night to ensure he wasn’t one of the few who grew so lethargic, their metabolisms couldn’t recover, sending them into a sleep they never woke from. James had sailed through the week of low energy, though.
Almost a year to the day after contracting the virus, James turned up at the hospital with a fever and complained that his bones ached. All of them.
Even more alarming was the migraine he complained about, and his stiff neck. That was shortly before he began to babble about fireworks in his eyes.
I thought I was dealing with meningitis, for the sy
mptoms were classic. As it turned out, he did have meningitis. Ninety percent of patients who move through the active phase suffer through a bout of it before their change is done. James, though, had far more than meningitis.
As he was the first victim in the world to shift to active phase, everyone, including me, thought that perhaps he was relapsing, for when he wasn’t screaming in agony, he was sloth-like in his lethargy and hard to rouse.
The last stage of active phase is the most painful, for the body is adjusted to express the new gene structure.
In hindsight, I am surprised we did not kill James with our ignorant treatment. We were reduced to treating symptoms, giving him the most powerful painkillers available, plus sedatives.
None of it helped. I stood by the end of his bed for the last night, watching him writhe against the straps we’d installed just to keep him on the bed, acquainting myself with a sense of helplessness I had not felt since I was sixteen.
So I just happened to be there to watch the change happen.
James Benson woke at sunset a changed…thing. He was considerably shorter than he had been. Wider in the shoulders. His skin was darker than a coastal Indian’s, and his jaw was squared, blocky and solid. It wasn’t until he sat up that I—and James—discovered he had leathery brown wings sprouting from his shoulder blades. They flapped out, elliptical in shape and fanning the air, and we both stared at them wordlessly.
James was the first Errata and the first hobgoblin to emerge. Within a week, three hundred and thirty-nine Tutu survivors shifted through their active phase. Thirty-five percent of them died during the meningitis stage. Five percent of them suicided, once they saw themselves in the mirror.
By far the most common shift was to goblyn or hobgoblin, with dwarves the next most common.
That first year still remains a blur to me, to this day. There was an endless river of patients. A stream of fatalities and suicides. The world staggered, shook itself off and tried to deal with the new reality…and it did not do well.
Because my patient was the first to shift to active phase, I was considered an expert. I admit, I was interested in the phenomena and accepted media calls and consults across Europe. Even as a doctor in the trenches, I had a perspective most others did not, and I tried to share that. I don’t know if I helped. I hope I did. When I compared myself to my Nobel-prize winning wife, I felt quite humble and kept trying harder.
The majority of my life for years was an endless round of security-sealed wards, helping humans through the agony of the active phase, then shepherding them to experts who could help them make the adjustment to their new reality.
Only, the experts had no idea how to help someone who was no longer human. The best support most of the new Errata could find was among their own kind, who had been where they were now.
So the Errata tended to clump together, while human political structures tried to figure out if they were quasi-human, inhuman, aliens…or enemies.
The United States of America was the first country to remove citizenship from the Errata. In the words of their president, “citizenship in these United States is meant to be earned. These creatures have not earned their right to live here.”
Six months later, that president was assassinated by a human who objected to his extreme right-wing policies. The new president, when he was elected six months later, did not see any need to lift the embargo upon the Errata.
Swiftly, a dozen countries followed America’s example, and suddenly, the world had to deal with a refugee problem upon a global scale. What were we supposed to do with races who had no country to call their own?
The city of Toledo, Spain, stepped up and raised its hand. The Secretary General of the United Nations, in a blazing, impassioned speech, pledged the resources of the UN and its infrastructure, including the WHO and other agencies, to help Toledo deal with the flood.
The Secretary General’s speech was watched by four billion people, both live and streaming, in the next week.
It was during that week that the WHO reached out to me to ask me to direct the camp that was being set up on the former military grounds across the river from the heart of Toledo.
I was burned out from years of dealing with shifting Errata. So I promised to think about their offer. Ffraid suggested we take the children to Cornwall for a couple of days, while I considered my options, as it would be a nice way to mark both mine and Gwendolyn’s joint June 21 birthdays.
I’ve seen a great many more Errata suffer through their active phase in the years since. Our understanding of the active phase has expanded considerably in that time, but we still are not sure how to help ease the process. We are too busy nursing Errata to break off and properly study them. Most of the precepts we had we’d developed on the fly, through heartbreaking trial and error.
It was that hard truth which lived in my heart and mind every time I worked in the surgery with another shifting Errata. It was a truth which lodged beneath my ribcage and squeezed my heart as we worked to help Elizabeth deal with her change.
Her every moan was a punch to the gut.
Meningitis set in around two that afternoon, although I had no real concept of what the time was. I left it to Suzuki to dictate the progress of the change to one of the aides, while I concentrated on Elizabeth, measuring her movements, her squirms, trying to anticipate what she might need, as she was unable to tell us herself.
In one of her quieter moments, I stepped out of the medical tent into the full blast of over one hundred degrees of belting heat and a still, silent afternoon. The protesters had decamped for the very pleasant Spanish custom of a siesta. The TV crews, too.
I was unobserved as I slipped back to my tent to deal with the exhaustion and the pain that came with being hunched over a hospital bed. I am tall and no bed was high enough to stop my back from hurting after a while.
When I returned to the clinic tent, Elizabeth was convulsing from the fever. Suzuki looked at me over Elizabeth. “I can help drop her fever.”
“Not if she’s becoming a dragon or a salamander,” I pointed out. “You’ll kill her.”
“Can’t you tell yet?” Suzuki shot back, as Elizabeth shuddered and moaned and we held onto an arm and a leg each. Straps didn’t help at this stage.
“I’m trying!” I shot back, dull anger gripping my temples.
When Elizabeth was still and quiet, we let the aides clean and tend her, while we took five minutes to gulp water and sit in a corner of the tent away from everyone.
“This isn’t going well,” Suzuki murmured.
I didn’t have time to answer. Fabricio, our most reliable medical aide, promoted to de facto nurse, came to tell us that he thought Schroeder was dead.
We both rose wearily to our feet and went to check. Schroeder had passed. He looked peaceful and free of pain, even though his body was a distorted hybrid, caught forever in mid-change. I left Suzuki to deal with the formalities, while I trod with heavy steps back to the surgery room and Elizabeth.
Aurelius de Changsa stepped around the blankets at the far end and caught my gaze. “May I enter?”
“This isn’t a good time,” I told him. Aurelius was a siren. Sirens were somewhat rare in the pantheon of new races we were dealing with. He had been physically altered from his change and was taller than he once was, although not as tall as the fae. Suzuki was taller. Like Suzuki, he’d kept a trace of his epicanthic folds and, oddly, still needed to wear glasses.
Sirens, like anwen, had very white skin, but silver hair, not transparent. The real change is only apparent when they speak. Their speaking voices are musical, reaching into one’s mind and stealing one’s attention, erasing all concerns and worries.
At least, they could do that when they wanted to. I had seen Aurelius turn his voice powers on and off at will. Even when he wasn’t trying to bamboozle someone, though, his voice was simply glorious. Mesmerizing, if I let myself try to analyze why it was so pleasant.
That gave me an idea. I moved o
ver to him and took his arm. “Actually, while you’re here, perhaps you can help me.” I marched him to the surgery room and put him at the end of the bed. Elizabeth was panting in her near-comatose state.
Aurelius’ jaw descended. “My god...” His gaze fixed upon Elizabeth.
“Talk to her,” I urged him. “Make her feel nothing but delight, the way you do.”
Aurelius rubbed his chin. “This is unlike you, Dr. Jones. You are a man of science. You realize what you are asking me to do?”
“I don’t care,” I railed harshly. “I know the power of your voice. I don’t need a peer review to confirm it. Just talk to her. Please.”
Aurelius pulled his glasses from his face and cleaned them on the edges of his shirt. Unlike the majority of the Errata, he wore a buttoned business shirt, white, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I wondered if he had been as precise a dresser when he was human. It fit his personality.
But perhaps his personality had been different when he was human, too. There was no way to tell. The Errata were reluctant to talk about where they had come from.
Also, I was usually too busy to linger for long conversations. And I was too busy now. I wanted to help Suzuki. It wasn’t fair to leave her with the unhappy task of seeing to Schroeder by herself.
“I have noticed, Dr. Jones, that you are a highly observant man,” Aurelius said. “Perhaps that is why you have the highest rate of success with the Errata—because you can discern what we need from how we behave and respond.”
I could feel my jaw descending. “I do? Have the highest success rate?”
“More Errata survive their phase shift under your care than with any other physician in the world.” Aurelius put his glasses back on and smiled at me. “You never stopped to wonder why Errata flood into Toledo every week and month? Have you not considered that most of them bring with them their families, who are still human, but were also Tutu victims?”
“I thought…they could not find happy circumstances where they are.” This was something I would have to consider, later. Is that what the goblyn…what was his name? Kettle? Ketill. Was that what he had done? Brought his entire family across the Atlantic on what must have been a horrible journey on the badly maintained container ships that were all the Errata could find to carry them here.