“Fucking stuff grows as fast as we can cut,” said Delagard sourly.
But they were making progress. Great chunks of the outgrowth were gone. In some places it had been cut back right to the original line of sea-finger weed.
The turn of Delagard and Kinverson came around once more. They chopped and slashed with diabolical fury. When they returned to the ship both men looked incandescent with exhaustion; they had passed beyond mere weariness into some transcendental state that left them glowing and exalted.
“Let’s go, doc,” Martello said. “It’s us again.”
Martello seemed determined to outdo even Kinverson. While Lawler kept the water-strider stabilized with a steady, numbing effort, Martello went after the vegetable enemy like some avenging god. Whack! Whack! Whack! He lifted the scraper high over his head, rammed it downward with a two-handed thrust, drove it deep. Whack! Whack! Huge sections of weed broke loose and floated away. Whack! Each stroke was mightier than the last. The water-strider tipped wildly from side to side. Lawler struggled to keep it upright. Whack! Whack!
Then Martello rose higher than ever before and brought the barnacle-scraper downward in a stroke of terrible force. It carved away an immense slab, clear back to the hull of the Queen. It must have come away more easily than Martello was expecting: Martello lost first his balance and then his grip on the scraper’s handle. He clawed at it, missed, and toppled forward, plunging with a heavy splash into the sea.
Lawler, still pedalling, leaned over and stretched out his hand. Martello was a couple of metres from the strider by now and flailing around desperately. But either he didn’t see the reaching hand or he was too far gone in panic to understand what to do.
“Swim toward me!” Lawler called. “Over here, Leo! Here!”
Martello continued to thrash and flounder. His eyes were glazed with shock. Then he stiffened suddenly as if wounded by a dagger from below. He began to jerk convulsively.
The davits were out over the water now. Kinverson was dangling from them. Lower,” he ordered. “A little more. That’s it. Over to the left. Good. Good.”
He caught the struggling Martello under the arms and reeled him in as though he were a child.
“Now you, doc,” Kinverson said.
“You can’t lift us both!”
“Come on. Here.”
Kinverson’s other arm locked itself around Lawler’s chest.
The davits rose. Swung inward over the rail, onto the deck. Lawler staggered free of Kinverson’s grip, stumbled and pitched forward, landed hard on both his knees. Sundira was at his side at once to help him up.
Martello, dripping wet, lay face upward, limp and motionless.
“Keep back,” Lawler ordered. He waved Kinverson away. “You too, Gabe.”
“We got to turn him over and pump the water out of him, doc.”
“It’s not the water I’m worried about. Get back, Gabe.” Lawler turned to Sundira. “You know where my bag of instruments is? The scalpels, and all? Bring it up on deck, will you?”
He knelt beside Martello and bared him to the waist. Martello was breathing, but he didn’t seem to be conscious. His eyes were wide, expressionless, unseeing. Now and again his lips would draw back in a frightful writhing grimace of pain and his whole body would go rigid and jerk as though an electrical current had passed through him. Then he would go limp again.
Lawler put his hand on Martello’s belly and pressed. He felt movement within: a trembling, a strange quivering, beneath the hard, tight band of abdominal muscle.
Something in there? Yes. This damnable ocean, invading wherever you gave it the slightest chance. But maybe it wasn’t too late to save him, Lawler thought. Clean him out, seal the wound, keep the community from being diminished any further.
Shadows moved about him. Everyone was crowding in, staring. They looked fascinated and repelled, both at once.
Brusquely Lawler said, “Clear out, all of you. You won’t want to see this. And I don’t want you watching me.”
No one moved.
“You heard the doctor,” came Delagard’s low growl. “Back off. Let him do his work.”
Sundira put his medical kit down on the deck beside him.
Lawler touched Martello’s abdomen again. Movement, yes. An unmistakable squirming. A quivering. Martello’s face was flushed, his pupils were dilated, his eyes were staring into some other world entirely. Hot sweat ran from every pore.
Lawler drew his best scalpel from the bag and set it down on the deck. He put both his hands on Martello’s abdomen just below the diaphragm and squeezed upward. Martello made a dull sighing sound, and a trickle of sea water and some vomit dribbled from his lips, but nothing else. Lawler tried again. Nothing. He felt motion again under his fingers: more spasms, more squirmings.
One more try. He turned Martello over and rammed his joined hands downwards against the middle of Martello’s back with all the strength he could find. Martello grunted. He spewed up some more thin puke. But that was all.
Lawler sat back for a moment, trying to think.
He turned Martello over again and picked up his scalpel.
“You won’t want to see this,” Lawler said to anyone who might be watching, without looking up, and drew a red line with the sharp iron point from left to right across Martello’s abdomen. Martello barely seemed to notice. He made a soft blurry sound, the vaguest of comments. Other distractions were taking priority for him.
Skin. Muscle. The knife seemed to know where it had to go. Deftly Lawler stripped back the layers of tissue. He was cutting now through the peritoneum. He had trained himself to enter an altered state of consciousness whenever he performed surgery, in which he thought of himself as a sculptor, not as a surgeon, and of the patient as something inanimate, a wooden log, not a suffering human being. That was the only way he could bear the process at all.
Deeper. He had breached the restraining abdominal wall, now. Blood mingled with the puddle of seawater around Martello on the deck.
The intestinal coils should come spilling out into view—
Yes. Yes. There they were.
Someone screamed. Someone uttered a grunt of disgust.
But not at the sight of the intestines. Something else was rising from Martello’s belly, something slender and bright, slowly unreeling itself and standing up on end. Perhaps six centimetres of it was visible: eyeless, seemingly even headless, just a smooth, slippery pink strip of undifferentiated living matter. There was an opening at its top end, a mouth of sorts, through which a sharp little rasping red tongue could be seen. The supple shining creature moved with supernal grace, gliding from side to side in a hypnotic way. Behind Lawler the screaming went on and on.
He struck the thing with a quick, steady backhand flick of his scalpel that cut it neatly in half. The upper end landed on the deck next to Martello, writhing. It began heading toward Lawler. Kinverson’s great boot descended at once and crushed it to slime.
“Thanks,” Lawler said quietly.
But the other half was still inside. Lawler tried to coax it out with the scalpel’s tip. It seemed untroubled by its bisecting; its dance continued, as graceful as before. Probing behind the heavy mound of intestines, Lawler struggled to dislodge it. He poked here, tugged there. He thought he saw the inner end of it and sliced at it, but there was more: another few centimetres still mocked him. He cut again. This time he had it all. He flipped it aside. Kinverson crushed it.
Everyone was silent now behind him.
He started to close the incision. But a new squirming motion made him stop.
Another one? Yes. Yes, one more, at least. Probably others. Martello groaned. He stirred slightly. Then he jerked with sudden force, rising a little way from the deck: Lawler got the scalpel out of the way just in time to keep from wounding him. A second eel rose into view and a third, weaving in that same eerie dance; then one of them pulled itself back in and disappeared once again into Martello’s abdominal cavity, burrowing upward in the general direction of his lungs.