Shockball (36 page)

“Scum who thought they could challenge me.”

“Oh, they’re crazy men.” Casually I walked back to have a look at the wounded troops. One of them was in bad shape, and just my luck, the worst enemy I had in the League besides Joseph. “It looks like you caught a pretty important guy here.”

“The one gasping over there? Shropana, is it not?”

“One and the same.”

“Do not concern yourself, patcher.” Rico waved an unsteady arm. “He does not breathe very much. He will be dead soon.”

“Maybe not.” I knelt down and checked him quickly. What I’d been worried about since I first examined him was about to happen. I rose to my feet. “He’s a powerful man, Chief. One who could possibly prove more beneficial alive.”

“Possibly.” Rico looked at Shropana. “He has not long to live, though.”

“I can keep him alive. He needs a heart operation.”

“Another patient for you, huh? Eventually everyone comes under your hands,” Rico said, then laughed uproariously. “There is nothing you can do for him here. Let him die.”

“On the contrary, I can do a great deal, if you’ll let me borrow your new footrest.”

“Why?”

I gave him a cool smile. “Patril here needs a new heart. Ilona won’t be needing hers much longer.”

The chief gave me an owlish stare. “You mean to cut out my footrest’s heart and give it to the alien?”

“The organs are compatible,” I said, hoping my nose wasn’t getting longer. “The League will pay you a fine reward for his return. Or, you can keep him here as a hostage against future attacks. The worst that can happen is they both die.”

Rico laughed again. “I like how you think, patcher. Very well.” He kicked Ilona’s body toward me. “Take them.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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Initiation

M
ilass helped me get enough men together to carry Ilona and Patril to the alcove, but he made it obvious he didn’t like the idea.

“I got her out of there for you, didn’t I?” I asked him. “What’s your problem now, shortie?”

“You will not harm her to save him,” he said as he directed the men carrying Ilona to a berth. Once she was on it, he took out his knife and began slicing through the ropes binding her limbs.

I left explanations for later. What I had to do now was get Patril prepped for surgery. I thanked the other men for helping us as they left, then did my preliminary scans. The Colonel’s heart could go at any moment. I was out of time and options—if I didn’t do the procedure, he would die.

“Did you hear me?” the demonic dwarf came up and gave me a push. “You will not cut out her heart.”

“I have no intention of cutting anything out of her, you moron. It was the only way I could think of getting her out of there before Rico did anything worse.”

Milass didn’t thank me. I think I would have dropped dead of a heart attack myself if he had. He did agree to go and find Hawk and bring him back to assist me.

Once more I grumbled under my breath about my lack of nurses as I completed the prep work and got Shropana sedated. As soon as he was under, I set up the instrument trays and cordoned off the area. I couldn’t make a sterile field, but I got everything as isolated as I could make it. Before I scrubbed, I went to check on Ilona.

Rico had done a good job on her; she had extensive facial fractures and all of her ribs and fingers were broken. Ilona wouldn’t be weaving anything for a couple of weeks.

She’d regained consciousness, and stared at me as I infused her with painkillers. “You help me—why?”

“I’m a masochist. Go figure.” I watched her drift under, then went to scrub and take care of my other pain in the ass.

Hawk limped in just as I finished gearing up. “Get sterile, we’ve got cardiac transplantation surgery to perform.”

“A transplant?” His mouth sagged open. “You can’t do that down here.”

“I’d better find a way, or this man will die.” I looked into the swollen, canine features of the Colonel who had chased me across the galaxy. “Believe me, his death is one I really don’t want on my conscience.”

Hawk scrubbed while I went to set up the laser rig and the heart-lung machine which would keep Shropana alive while I installed the replacement heart. A couple of scans made me readjust the calibration of the Jarvik biomechanical replacement unit I’d swiped from Joseph’s lab; it wasn’t going to be a perfect fit. Still, it would serve as a temporary fix until I could get him out of the tunnels and up to a regular medical facility.

“You know something, Hawk? I think I’d amputate a limb just to have access to a nice, big, well-stocked medical facility.”

“The gods do not give us more than we can handle. I know this man,” Hawk said as he took position by the instrument trays. “This is the one who has been asking for your execution.”

“Yep.” I adjusted the optic emitter to give me maximum light over Shropana’s brisket.

“Is there anyone you will not operate on?”

“First rule of being a surgeon: You don’t get to pick and choose who ends up on your table.” I powered up the rig and leaned over. “Here we go.”

My first radical decision was not to remove Shropana’s diseased heart, but to perform a heterotopic transplant, which would leave the native heart in place. To do this, I didn’t sever the diseased organ from the atria, but refitted them to pair off with the Jarvik replacement’s connections.

Hawk spotted what I was doing at once. “Why do you put the machine heart on top of the old one?”

“To give Colonel Shropana a heart with eight chambers, instead of four. The Jarvik will take care of circulatory supply and return, and the other four can do whatever they want.”

“Would it not be easier to take the old heart out?”

“Easier, sure, if he was human. He’s not, and this unit wasn’t designed for his species. I’m hoping a better-equipped surgeon can salvage the native heart, and remove or replace the Jarvik.”

If we ever got Patril back to the League.

I started the work on the pulmonary arterial and aortic junctions. From the amount of plaque in his vessels, I’d have to adjust his medication regime and his diet while he was with us. That would make me even more popular with the bad-tempered military mogul when he woke up.

“How will it continue to function?” Hawk asked me. “You said you have no power core.”

“Don’t need one. We’re going to do this the way they did before autonomous power cores were invented. See these air lines?” I indicated the tubes I would be putting in the chest wall. “They’re going to do all the hard part. We’ll rig him to an external compressor that will feed pressure through the lines.”

“I will sing for him later,” Hawk said.

It sounded like all we’d need was a song, but as soon as I tested the Jarvik, things got complicated. The biomechanical heart had to be recalibrated twice before it attained the proper pumping sequence and speed. As soon as I performed the preclosure test activation, an internal safety valve shut the unit down.

“It still thinks he’s human,” I said, scrambling to disable the safeties. I could only pray the components wouldn’t seize up while they were running at three times the set rate. “One more test, and then we’ll plug him in.”

The second test was successful. Now I had to take Shropana off the machine that was keeping him alive, and see if all my hard work would do the same.

Hawk murmured something under his breath as I switched on the external compressor. There was an instant of silence before the Jarvik began to pump. Shropana’s vital signs elevated slightly, then leveled out.

“It worked.” The skin around his dark eyes crinkled in a surgeon’s smile. “You made it work.”

“Piece of cake.” I watched the Jarvik for a few minutes, just to be sure. Then I showed Hawk how to close, and suture the long incision.

At the cleanser unit, he scrubbed in silence.

I worried for a minute that I’d demanded too much of him. “Not what you expected?”

“No. It is so much more… beautiful. Like dancing inside a soul.” He glanced over at Shropana, then at me. “How long does it take? To learn to do these surgeries?”

“As long as you want it to take.”

He discarded his bloody gloves. “I want to do more of this. I want to learn more. Will you teach me?”

“We won’t get in any more alien cardiac replacement cases, I think.” I thought of Vlaav, and how I had wrecked that. “Still, if you’re willing, I’ll start you off.”

Hawk didn’t have much time for lessons over the next nine days, as he began the Night Way. I joined the tribe every night for the chanting and ritual sings that, according to my new student, would attract holiness and repulse evil.

I didn’t know about the curative effects, but the ceremony involved the entire tribe, which made it very loud, anyway.

“Explain this to me,” I said to Hawk as I adjusted his back brace on the morning of the ceremonial. “How is it that a tribe who owns a major shockball-team franchise doesn’t give in to the temptation of material wealth? I mean, Rico has to be taking in millions of credit a month, just from the arena ticket sales and advertising.”

“Most of the profits are reinvested in the team. The non-Indian players must be paid, of course. The Night Horse contribute their portion to the tribal fund.”

“I thought Rico used all that to pay for purchasing the Gliders.”

“Now we use it for to provide dowries for our men.” Hawk nodded toward a group of villagers from the surface. “Ten will return to Four Mountains this month, to offer for their brides.”

“I thought you had broken off with the Navajo.”

“Not in marriage. It is forbidden for our men to marry within the clan. We have been sending young men back to the reservation to seek brides and settle down for many years. The Four Mountains clans have welcomed them.”

That bothered me. Why was he really sending his people back to the surface? He’d led them from Four Mountains, started a new tribe, and moved underground rather than stay on the reservation and live under “whiteskin” laws. Now he was funding the way for the Night Horse to rejoin the mother tribe?

Could he be trying to deliberately infect the Navajo, and through them the general population, with syphilis? It might take months, even years before someone identified the cause and treatment for the disease, and by then it would constitute a worldwide epidemic.

I rejected that idea at once. Sure, Rico might slit someone’s throat, or beat up his girlfriend. But he wasn’t sophisticated or psychotic enough to attempt that kind of random, global destruction. Someone like my creator might pull it off. But the Night Horse chief was no Joseph Grey Veil. Besides, Rico still thought the disease was a curse from the gods.

Hawk explained that the first day of the
Tl’ééjí
was devoted to the purification and consecration of the special hogan built for the ceremonials. Hawk called it “The Day of the East.”

“Today we perform the first rite of exorcism, the breath of life,” Hawk said to the crowd gathered around the Night Way hogan. “There will be prayer ritual, the cleansing of the sweat bath, and honor to the sacred mountains.”

I refrained from pointing out there weren’t any mountains around, and went in for a few minutes to watch the festivities.

It was interesting, in a Navajo kind of way. Hawk used special gourds and lots of corn meal and pollen to purify and consecrate the hogan. Everyone chanted without stopping. I wondered idly how much breath control it took to accomplish that, and how many sore throats I was going to have to treat tomorrow.

“Here.” Hawk thrust something covered with beads and feathers in my hands. “Offer this up to Changing Woman for us.”

It was some kind of elongated pot filled with ground, dried corn. “Urn, I don’t exactly know any prayers,” I told him.

“Cast it into the fire, and say what you will.”

I went to the fire, and shook out some of the corn-meal over the flames. Prayers. Right. Like I knew.

Might as well keep it simple. “Changing Woman, accept this offering and bestow your blessings here.”

Despite my cynical attitude toward religion, performing the offering moved me. The smell of the corn burning was sweet and pervasive. I could almost feel the weight of the eyes watching me. Beyond that, there was a feeling of connection to something I’d never recognized in myself before.

Come on, Cherijo. Next thing you know you’ll be abandoning your laser to hold sings for injured patients.

The assembled repeated what I’d said, only in Navajo. I turned to hand the pot-thing back to Hawk. He looked amused.

“Your blood is red after all, patcher.”

I stayed until the purification rites were through, then headed back to my alcove to check on my patients and make sure Rico hadn’t recovered from his hangover and come looking for a heart-less Ilona. Reever was feeding the cats, but I spotted his shock-ball uniform hung over one of the containers. I kicked it over, and that got his attention.

“You know I must do this, Cherijo.”

“We didn’t get around to discussing why the other night.”

“Not for the reasons you think.” He picked up Juliet. Since he was her favorite human, she let him. “We’ll talk after the game.”

Shropana’s mechanical heart was still ticking, but he was very weak and couldn’t be brought out of sedation just yet. I made note of his vitals and ran some routine cardiac screens. The native heart was functioning at about twenty percent, which was enough to keep it alive. The Jarvik did the rest of the work. Due to his advanced age, recuperation would probably take a few months.

Ilona was in much better shape, although I’d immobilized her in multiple bonesetters. She wasn’t going anywhere for a while, either. She also tested positive for first-stage syphilis, which made me wonder if she was the carrier. I just couldn’t picture her with Hawk. Since she was asleep, I didn’t wake her, but added her meds to her infuser line.

I moved the privacy screen back in place, and stacked the containers we’d been using to help conceal Ilona’s presence. Then I sat down to watch Reever dress.