"You didn’t heal by yourself," Havel said. "If the bones had knit on their own, the fracture sites would be a million times worse. A lot wouldn’t heal at all — the bone ends would be too apart to grow back together again. Someone damned good at orthopedics set each little break so it would fuse as good as new… and the surgery was performed within a few hours of the damage.
"On top of that," the doctor continued, "here’s the real telltale sign you got high-class medical attention." He pointed to a series of squiggles written in bright red on the table screen. They were not an alphabet I recognized; I assumed they were some hateful Scientific Notation describing tedious Chemicals.
"Your spinal fluid," Havel said, "contains the residue of a nifty little drug called Webbalin: developed on the planet Troyen several decades back, when the Mandasars were the best medical researchers in our sector. Webbalin prevents cerebral degradation after your neurons stop getting fresh blood; without it, a human suffers irreversible brain damage within five to ten minutes of coronary arrest. Even if someone gets your heart pumping again later on, you won’t be the same person. Your old brain architecture has fallen apart — the trillions of linkages that make you unique get erased by neuron decay. Even if we grow you new neurons, they won’t link together in the same way. Without Webbalin to keep your original gray matter from rotting, your body might get brought back to life, but your memories and personality sure won’t."
"And you found this Webbalin stuff in Oar’s spinal fluid?" Uclod asked.
"She obviously received a massive dose," Havel replied. "Enough to leave traces four years after the fact."
"Doctor," Nimbus said, "how soon does Webbalin have to be administered after death? In order to be effective."
"It’s usually given before death," Havel answered. "If a trauma victim’s in danger of dying, you want Webbalin in the patient’s bloodstream as soon as possible. Get it circulating while the heart is still working; then when the crash comes, ha-ha, the brain will be safe for ten hours instead of ten minutes. Gives you a lot more leeway for patching up the poor bastard."
"But suppose the patient has already died. Does that mean you only have ten minutes to inject the drug?"
"Worse than that," Havel told him. "Ten minutes to get the drug saturating the brain. Which is damned difficult if you don’t have blood circulation. You can force-pump a dose inside the cranium and hope it soaks into the cells… but that’s just farting around to mollify the next-of-kin. It seldom works at all, and it never works completely. If you’re lucky, you salvage thirty percent of the brain, tops. That’s rarely enough to keep the patient alive, let alone, ha-ha, help him remember the password to his bank account — which is often the family’s prime concern."
"So if Oar’s brain survived…" Nimbus said thoughtfully.
"It did survive," I told him. "It survived just fine. I am quite as clever as I have ever been."
"Maybe," Uclod said, "that’s because you ain’t human, toots. Your brain cells might not rot as fast as the average Homo sap. Maybe that’s how you stayed intact till the Pollisand picked you up."
"Or maybe," Nimbus suggested, "the drug was injected ahead of time. While you were still alive. Before you took the fall."
"No one injected me with drugs! I would know!"
But I was not so certain as I pretended. Only a short time before my fall, I had been lying unwatched in a state of unconsciousness. This was the result of being shot repeatedly with a whining noise-gun, causing such horrendous damage that I blacked out. When I eventually awoke, I located the villain who shot me and plunged with him from the tower… but during the period I was insensate, there was no way to tell what someone might have done to me.
"It does seem far-fetched," Dr. Havel said, "that the Pollisand injected Ms. Oar with Webbalin in advance. There’d be no reason to do that unless he knew she was going to take a swan-dive, ha-ha, onto bare cement. And the only way he could know that is by…"
"Foreseeing the future?" Nimbus said. "Isn’t that what the Pollisand is noted for? Being in exactly the right place when things go wrong?"
No one spoke for a moment. Then Uclod muttered, "Bloody hell."
Unpruned Anomalies
A time passed without conversation… which is to say, Dr. Havel talked and nobody paid attention. What he talked about was me as a "specimen" — his first "marvelous chance" to examine an "alien life-form never before seen by medical science," and he was "thrilled, absolutely thrilled" to have the opportunity.
But the foolish thing was, he did not examine me at alclass="underline" he examined my picture on the table, while I stood bored at his elbow. And instead of praising my beauty and grace, he was forever blathering about Chemicals: substances with long complex names that my body contained, in lieu of other substances with long complex names that it did not. For example, it was apparently most remarkable that my blood did not include Hemogoblins (which I believe are little trolls that live in human veins); in place of those, I had Transparent Silicate Platelets (which, as the name suggests, are miniature plates that carry food from one cell to another).
Moreover, though I appeared visually similar to Homo sapiens, my composition was entirely different. I had numerous glands not found in humans; my basic internal organs (heart, lungs, and stomach) were arranged differently from Earthlings; even my bones were unique, and their attachments to various muscles deviated greatly from the Terran standard. I was, Havel said, a vastly different species from humans, structurally as well as chemically… but my nonhuman parts were assembled in such a way that I looked "morphologically human" on the outside. "Like a cat," said the doctor, "who’s been engineered to resemble a dog. Except that cats and dogs have a lot more in common with each other than you do with humans — your body chemistry is utterly extraterrestrial."
Finally, it seemed my brain had never undergone a process the doctor called pruning. He said this was something that happens to all known intelligent races by mid-adolescence: a large number of existing connections between mental neurons wither away in the interest of "efficiency." The theory goes that during childhood, the brain has many surplus linkages between neighboring nerve cells, because there is no telling which will eventually prove necessary. By adolescence, however, a person’s day-to-day experiences have established which connections are actually used and which are superfluous fripperies — links that never get activated in everyday life. The brain therefore discontinues low-use links as a means of streamlining the most common thought processes… making sure that essential mental activity is not slowed by extraneous clutter.
The doctor claimed pruning is good and desirable: a pruned brain is more quickly decisive, less plagued by needless doubts and uncertainties. After pruning, your brain knows conclusively that objects always fall down instead of up, that it is a poor idea to stick your hand into fire, and that animals never really talk; indeed, a pruned brain is resistant to, and even threatened by, any notion it has come to regard as absurd. The "mature" mind shuts the door on the impossible, so it can concentrate on The Real.
Or at least, that is what Havel claimed.
For myself, I did not think The Real deserved such drastic sacrifice. If pruning is the price of adulthood, is it not more courageous to remain a child? Of course one knows animals speak infrequently (and it is hard to believe ugly animals such as lizards will ever become engaging conversationalists); but it seems most high-handed to reject the possibility entirely. I tried to argue this point with the doctor, but because his brain had been pruned, he exhibited nothing but galling condescension toward my "naive" views… which meant I was close to choking him when Festina entered the room.