Festina sat at the table, her eyes staring off into space as if she were thinking very great thoughts. I decided it would be pleasant to think great thoughts of my own; but the only thing in my mind was that I was walking away from my friend.
13: WHEREIN I AM THOROUGHLY EXAMINED
More Tiny Things Invading My Person
Sick bay did not hurt, but it tickled. I could not see what did the tickling, so I blamed Nimbus — I thought he was sending specks of himself to brush against me, making my nose itchy and causing awkward irritations all over my body. But the cloud man swore he had nothing to do with it; he claimed to be suffering personal disturbances of his own, because the air of the infirmary was filled with Analysis Nano.
I did not know what Analysis Nano was, but the navy physician was delighted to explain. He was, in fact, delighted about every conceivable aspect of existence: the opportunity to examine me was "fabulous"; my personal transparency was "amazing"; and the chance to carry out a task for Festina was "a great, great honor." His name was Havel, a paunchy watery-eyed human who seemed to perceive more reasons to laugh than anyone else in the room. Dr. Havel was constantly chuckling or giggling or snickering over things that seemed quite ordinary indeed. He also displayed much hearty enthusiasm about anything that passed before his eyes… which meant when he said, "Ho, ho, you’re a stunner, the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen," I was not so gratified as I might have wished.
Some men are too easy to impress. When they praise your ethereal crystalline beauty, you get the feeling they would be just as ecstatic over a glittery red pebble or a potato shaped like a fish.
On the other hand, Dr. Ha-Ha-Havel was a good person to approach for clarifications of important Scientific topics — he was so enchanted with the glories of the universe, he would gladly tell you whatever he could, and never suggest you were ignorant for not knowing. Therefore he explained that Analysis Nano was a swarm of millions and billions of tiny machines, so small they could not be seen. They buzzed around patients in sick bay, reading your pulse, your body temperature, and the composition of your sweat. At instructions from the physician, the little bugs could also delve beneath your skin, digging for blood samples or flying down your throat to examine the workings of your stomach.
I did not want tiny machines journeying through my digestive system; but Dr. Havel said a number of them had already gone down my esophagus, and it did not hurt a bit, did it?
He was correct. It did not hurt, so I could not punch: him. But everything itched a great deal, as I have already said, and some of the nanos ventured into places they were not welcome. Though I wore my Explorer jacket, the coat did not seem sufficiently skilled at protecting the parts of me that needed safekeeping.
Myself Exposed
After five minutes of such indignities, Dr. Havel clapped his hands together with Anticipatory Zeal. "Well then, let’s see what my clever little helpers have discovered."
He scurried to a table in the middle of the room: the sort of table one might lie upon when being examined by a real physician.[9] However, Dr. Havel never once asked me to lie down; and when I looked at the table, I saw why not.
[9] — I am familiar with physicians because there were excellent medical machines in my home village. Once every month, I was required to recline on a proper examination table and submit to Necessary Regimens Of Health. These entailed authentic poking and prodding, not annoying little itches that lacked the courage of their convictions.
The entire table-top was a viewing screen… and there on the screen, life-size, was the exposed anatomy of a woman who could only be me. I do not say I recognized myself — instead of a face, there was an opaque rendering of my skull, not to mention whitish versions of other bones in my body, laid over internal organs depicted in ugly unnatural colors — but the general outline matched my own, so who else could it be?
"I do not look like that," I said. "My bones are not white; they are pleasingly transparent."
Dr. Havel laughed the way he laughed at everything. "Quite right, Ms. Oar, quite right, ha-ha. I got the computer to colorize your lovely insides so we could see everything better. You’re clearly designed to be clear, ha-ha, at least to human eyes; but once we scan you on IR and UV, not to mention X-rays, ultrasound, MRI, bioelectrics and so on, we get a lovely picture of what we can’t discern in the visible spectrum."
He proudly waved his hand toward the image — which I found most disconcerting to look at. When I breathed in, the picture’s lungs inflated; when I exhaled, the picture’s lungs did the same. I tried taking breaths in quick little gasps, hoping the machine would be thrown off and unable to match my rhythm… but no matter what I did, the image on the table imitated it exactly.
If I held myself quiet, I could fed my heart beating in perfect unison with the ugly crimson heart shown on the screen. Just noticing that made my heart beat faster. The picture’s heart beat faster too. I had the most disquieting sensation the image controlled my pulse instead of the other way around; so I looked at the floor until the sensation went away.
Meanwhile, Dr. Havel went around the table and placed his finger against the screen — not on my picture, but off to one side, where there was nothing but blank blackness. A host of squiggles appeared where his finger touched: printing in four different colors of light, and little diagrams that probably revealed vital facets of my health.
"Hmmr Dr. Havel announced. "Ms. Oar, it turns out you’re yourself."
"This is not a clever machine if that is its best observation."
"Oh," said he, "you think it’s reporting the obvious? Not at all, ha-ha, ha-ha. Before you got here, Admiral Ramos called to brief me… and when I heard your story, I bet the good admiral a modest sum you’d turn out to be a clone of the original Oar. But you aren’t."
"How can you tell?" Uclod asked.
The doctor must have been hoping for that question. "See here?" he said most gleefully. He patted his fingers against the screen, right on the picture of my ribs. The image expanded to show a magnified view, twice as big as before. Havel patted again and the picture expanded a second time; several more pats, and all you could see was one little patch of bone, blown up to fill the body-sized screen.
"All right," the doctor said, "fourth rib, right side: look at this area here." He circled his pudgy hand above the center of the picture, where there was an obvious line etched into the bone. "See this ridge running up the middle? And the bump at the top: one side of the ridge is a bit higher than the other. That’s a fracture site. The bone broke and didn’t quite knit cleanly. It’s only a microscopic discrepancy — whoever set the fracture did a fantastic job, better than any human surgeon. And the healing was more complete than anything I’ve seen in Homo sapiens, But magnify the image a few hundred times, and ta-da! The glitch is there, plain as day."
I stared at the picture. I did not like thinking my rib had a flaw in it, no matter how small.
"And," the doctor went on, "there are dozens of similar breaks throughout the skeletal system: the chest, the arms, the front of the face. Ms. Oar, you definitely suffered massive trauma at some point in the past — consistent with falling from a tall building, and your upper torso taking the brunt of the impact. Since I don’t know your species’ rate of recovery, I can’t tell how long ago the damage happened; but it’s safe to conclude you’re the same Oar who plummeted off the tower four years back."
"I know that," I told him. "I suffered Grievous Wounds and it took me time to heal."