The Sum of Her Parts (6 page)

Probably she’d initially panicked when she had been swept away from him and had never regained control of herself. Go figure. Street bum keeps his cool and doctor panics. He’d have something to say about that.

Then she went under again, did not resurface, and he feared he might not have someone to listen to the chidings he intended to deliver.

Only the fact that some air had become trapped in her pack saved her. As he was giving up hope this added buoyancy bounced her back to the surface, facedown in the water. Having outdistanced its burden of plant matter, drowned small creatures, sand, soil, and sodden humans, the front of the flood and its throaty roar
began to recede southward. Ramrod current had given way to irritated swirls by the time he got a hand on the upper straps of her pack, rolled her over, and started swimming to his right. Though equally flush with flood, the water in the tributary ravine he had spotted offered no resistance to his methodical strokes as he towed her out of the main flow. Narrowing while its floor rose rapidly, the bottom of the side canyon soon provided slippery but welcome purchase for his feet.

Without knowing quite how he did it, his boots slipping on loose gravel and slick rocks and his slenderized muscles on fire, he hauled her body, backpack, and all up out of the side stream and onto dry land. There he laid her out on her back and collapsed beside her, his chest heaving. The empty blue overhead offered not even a solitary cloud by way of consolation.

“Didn’t think … didn’t think we’d make it, doc.” He wiped at his mouth, coughed, and spat onto the moisture-welcoming surface. The droplets vanished instantly as they struck, sucked down into the ever-thirsty ground. “I couldn’t hold you … I’m sorry. Why—why didn’t you try to swim back to me? I didn’t think I was going to be able to catch up to …”

She wasn’t responding. Her eyes remained shut. Around her head her maniped red hair spread out in a saturated flaming corona. She was not moving. A coldness born of something much deeper and more malign than his recent swim crept over him.

“Doc? Ingrid?”

Oh hell, oh damn, oh shit. She was dead. She was dead and he was alone. Alone in the desert. Alone in the Namib. Alone inside. Or—maybe not. Could the patient save the doctor? Try, try, he had to try—but what to do?

Bad water, good air. A prescription that was as straightforward as it was simple. Slipping frantically out of his pack, he rose to his knees and dumped it quickly to one side as he bent over her. Pressing
both hands against her stomach, he pushed, not knowing if he was pressing too hard, not knowing if he was doing it right. He repeated the thrust once, twice. On the third time her body reacted: arching sharply upward, she retched from the bottom of her toes, spewing foul water and other stomach contents all over him. Turning his face away he ignored the warm dousing and prepared to push some more.

He couldn’t. Her stomach was out of his reach. Having rolled onto her left side she was jerking and spasming violently while clutching her midsection with both hands. More water gushed from her mouth to disappear in seconds into the desiccated earth. When the last foul drops had dribbled from her lips, her hands relaxed and all the air seemed to sigh out of her body. Her eyes remained closed. She was motionless once more.

“Ingrid? Hey, doc, you okay?” Reaching over, he put a hand on her side and shoved. Gently at first, then when no reaction was forthcoming, more forcefully. Her right arm bobbed loosely.

He didn’t want to roll her over onto her back again in case there was still any water in her stomach or lungs, but he felt he had no choice. As he bent over her he startled himself by realizing that despite the desperate circumstances he was still able to recognize the irony of the situation. Here he was, targeting the lips and mouth with whose contact he had longed for since that day in her office, and he felt no stirring beyond a distinct touch of nausea that threatened to make him empty his own guts.

Mouth-to-mouth. He wasn’t trained in that ancient revival technique either, but he would do his best to improvise. Inclining his head forward and down he bent nearer, his open palms bracing themselves against the warm ground on either side of her shoulders. He was very close to her when she coughed in his face and her eyelids fluttered.

He drew back hurriedly.

Her eyelids snapped open and she took a moment to focus. “I think I’m not dead.”

A tight smile creased his narrow visage. “I’ll take that as an official medical pronouncement.”

She started to reply and instead found herself trying to throw up again. The resulting muscular confusion generated one of the more remarkable facial expressions he’d ever seen on a Natural. Once her body relaxed, she swallowed and tried again.

“I feel like I did though. Die, that is. What happened?” Raising her head slightly she looked around. “Where’s the water?”

“Where it belongs, in the canyon. The level’s going down almost as fast as it came up. Speaking of coming up, I doubt there’s much of anything left in your stomach, so you should be all right now.” He smiled. “Just my street medical opinion.”

Looking down at herself she pressed the fingertips of both hands lightly against her torso in the vicinity of her navel. Her expression turned queasy but she did not heave. “Doesn’t feel all right. I really thought I was dead.” Sudden realization made her look at him sharply as she sat all the way up. “How did I get out?”

“I came after you. Swam, pulled you out. Saved your life. Sorry, but I don’t believe in false modesty. If I hadn’t risked mine you wouldn’t now have yours.”

She pondered this for a long moment. “Why did you do it, Whispr?”

He looked away from her and toward the ravine. Moments ago it had been filled to the brim with a roaring torrent. Now it gurgled merrily, like a retired professional athlete toying with outmatched neighborhood opponents.

“I dunno. Congenital stupidity, maybe.” When she started to say something he jumped in ahead of her. “Speaking of congenital stupidity why the hell didn’t you swim toward me when you saw me coming after you? I know you saw me—our eyes met. It would’ve
made things a lot easier. You wouldn’t have sunk so close to the edge.” His anger helped to shove thoughts of the near mouth-to-mouth experience out of his mind.

She looked away. “Whispr—I can’t swim.”

That was not one of the responses he had been expecting. “What the fark do you mean you can’t swim? Everyone in the Greater Savannah region can swim. They have to learn. Too much of the place is underwater. What idiots never taught you to swim?”

Her voice strengthened a little. “My idiot parents, who raised me in Topeka, overlooked passing along that particular skill. Not a critical need for it in Topeka.”

“I suppose not,” he acknowledged. “Uh, where’s Topeka?”

She told him. “Dry country. High country. Safe country. I learned a lot, but not how to swim. I was always too busy with academics. Didn’t even get to the local soche very often to mix with the other kids.” Noting his expression she added, “I know it doesn’t make any sense. There are several exercise pools in my tower, salt water as well as fresh, and I’ve never done more than wade in any of them. I love the beach, I even love the water. I just can’t swim.” She swallowed hard and her voice dropped. “If you hadn’t come after me, Whispr, I’d have drowned.”

Before he realized it, he spoke more harshly than he intended. “Tell me something I don’t know.” He was stunned and confused by what happened next.

Dr. Ingrid Seastrom started to cry.

Despite everything they had been through, despite all they had endured since leaving Savannah, she had always maintained her composure throughout. She had not cried when Napun Molé had held them at gunpoint in the Everglades, nor when their fleeing 4×4 had crashed into the river in Sanbona. She had not cried when Josini Jay-Joh Umfolozi had stuck a gun in her face in the cab of his
nephew’s commercial transporter and threatened to blow her brains out.

Whispr knew how to deal with an attack on the street. He knew how to disarm aggravated police with flattering words and outmaneuver muscle-bound lods with practiced side steps. He knew the best way to wrangle “donations” from kindhearted tourists and riffle unaware business folk. But he did not have the slightest notion what to do now. So he fell back on his tried and true method for minimizing mistakes: he did nothing.

“I can’t … I don’t know, Whispr,” she coughed between sobs. “I’m not … I wasn’t made for this. I should be in my office back home treating the sick and injured, not
being
the sick and injured. ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ ” She started to laugh but was too weak to do more than gasp a few desultory chuckles. “This is all a bad dream. You, assassins, SICK, the thread; all of it. We’re going to die here and it’s my fault. My stubborn, stupid, single-minded fault! A bad dream. Bad karma.”

He’d had enough. “Bad drama, you mean.” Reaching down, he slipped his arms under hers and lifted her to her feet. In her expression, confusion and despair made room for shock. “Get a
hold
of yourself, doc! First of all, the ‘we’re all gonna die’ mantra is mine. I claim it by right of origination. So you can forget about blubbering that one again. You want to bawl? Fine, go ahead and tearwork your lady ducts until they’re as dry as the ground where we’re standing. But we
are
here and we
are
going to go on and we are going to get into the facility at Nerens and learn what that thread is all about. Then maybe we’ll end up dead, but not before. Because I’m damned if I’ve wasted all this time and trouble and energy and effort just to indulge some spoiled bitchwitch of a doctor who thinks she’s on some tiptoliday and can just up and quit and call a cab to go home because she’s decided to go all boredass on me!”

She stood gaping at him wide-eyed until he finally ran down. At first he thought she was going to break out crying again. Then what he hoped would happen began to take place before his eyes. She started to get mad. Serious mad. When she swung at him he dodged. When she aimed a furious frustrated kick at his crotch he slipped easily to one side. The fact that he was smiling at her all the while only squared her fury.

“You bastard! You miserable bumscum, you filthy …!”

“That’s it, doc.” As he avoided her futile, untutored blows and kicks he did his best to egg her on. “Get it all out. All the aggravation, all the anger; leave it here on the sand and rock. Mix it with your vomit. Whoa!” Her next blow nearly connected with his face. “I can’t argue about one thing, though,” he concluded as he continued to dance around her. “You got me all wet again.”

Still livid but too exhausted by her near death swim to keep swinging, she paused and blinked at him. Then she started to laugh again, only this time it was more than a couple of transitory chuckles. She laughed until she cried, and then she was crying again, and then laughing. Holding at a safe distance and watching her he was reminded of why, as a friend had once told him while sharing a particularly potent stim in Eastwood Park in the north of the city, women were not just another gender but another species.

He let her face flood until he feared she might sprain something. “Okay, doc. That’s enough. I think you got everything out now. Food, flood water, emotions. You
look
drained, anyway.” Approaching warily, he gripped her right shoulder and squeezed reassuringly.

Her eyes tilted up to meet his own and for a moment, for an instant, there was something in her expression that …

He imagined she was going to embrace him. He welcomed it and he feared it. As it turned out, the emotional energy he devoted
to both possibilities was wasted because she held off, held back, and instead of moving toward him, knelt to fumble with her pack. Within his shriveled soul a small spark winked out as swiftly as it had unexpectedly sprung to life. Wordlessly, he bent to help her.

Her communicator was gone, swept away by the force of the flood that had ripped open the pockets of her pants. That left them with only his own device and, in a dire emergency, a simple mechanical compass. Using only those instruments they would have to make it the rest of the way to Nerens. The antique compass with its magnetic needle and flat unilluminated face had been an afterthought, pressed on them by the shopkeeper in Orangemund who had outfitted them with their trekking supplies. It was one piece of gear that did not need batteries.

Leaving her to finish going through her battered pack he left to make an inventory of his own supplies. Thanks to the unbreakable pack straps both of them still had their sleeping blankets, waterpaks, and most of their food concentrates. For one terrible moment he thought that the tubes containing his vital nutrient supplements had been swept away. He finally found the package, still dry and intact, where it had become wrapped up in a shirt. All they had surrendered to the rampaging flash flood was some food, some time, and some unreasonable assumptions.

“You can do this, doc.” He stood nearby as she finished repacking her gear. “We can do this. Sure we’ll end up dead eventually, but we can do this.”

She had tied the bottom of her shirt up in a knot beneath her breasts, exposing her belly. Not that the sight of the few creamy centimeters of exposed flesh were all that he could have wished for, but he would take what he could get. They constituted a wondrous diversion from the desiccated terrain around them.

“Once again, Whispr,” she observed dryly, “I find myself having
to rely on your unreserved enthusiasm to motivate me.” She took a deep breath, which did wonders for his own motivation. “I promise you this: if we make it to Nerens and I can get us inside, you won’t be killed.”

“How can you make a promise like that?” He hastened to parallel her as she struck off northward, following the edge of the ravine that had tried to kill them.

“In the full knowledge that if I’m wrong I won’t have to listen to you harangue me about it.”

He snorted. “Ah, see—now
you’re
the one who’s smiling.”

Periodically pausing to check their progress against the maps contained in his communicator, they followed the ravine northward until it turned east toward the mountains that had spawned the flash flood. There followed another broad stretch of hard ground that save for scattered gravel was as smooth and flat and lifeless as the paved floor of a building supply warehouse. As they advanced, Whispr kept glancing nervously at the sky. Out on such open terrain they would be as visible to a searcher drone or passing hi-rez satellite as the Eiffel Tower in a cornfield.