War in Heaven (65 page)

"I don't have any of the pain medicines left," Rodas said. "But I can use a nerve block; we'll do what we can."

"I'm afraid," Jonathan said.

"I know you are," Rodas said. He patted Jonathan's head and then traded long, grave looks with Danlo and Tamara. "If all goes well I can have both feet off in less than five minutes."

"So ... quickly?" Danlo asked.

"I'll have the assistance of Fostora-made surgical robots. There is only one thing ... "

"Yes?"

Rodas lowered his voice. "The surgery
will
be quick, but you'll have to help. You and the boy's mother."

"Help ... how?"

"You'll have to hold him down."

"I see."

"Can you do this?"

Danlo took a long, deep breath, and then said, "I think so. Yes."

"I'm having restraints made to fit my chair," Rodas said. "But they're not ready yet. Who would ever have thought I'd have to resort to such barbarisms?"

But Danlo had no answer for him. All he could do was to look at Jonathan as he lay trembling on his furs.

"Very well," Rodas said. "And the boy's mother — will she be able to help, too?"

Danlo waited while his heart beat five times, and then he said, "Yes — she is very strong."

"Very well," Rodas said again, more loudly. "We should begin soon."

"And what will the cost be?" Tamara asked.

"There will be no cost to you," Rodas said. "Not for this."

"But your time, your tools, your — "

"Others pay what they can," Rodas broke in. He looked off towards the door that led to his outer rooms where the astrier woman and exemplar waited. "There are still many rich people in Neverness."

"Thank you," Tamara said.

Rodas nodded to Danlo, who squatted to lift Jonathan into his arms. Despite the room's heat, Jonathan was shaking and shivering more violently now. He looked up at Danlo with his sad, knowing eyes and said, "Please, Father — I'm afraid."

"It will be all right," Danlo said. He brushed the hair back from Jonathan's forehead. "Truly, it will be all right."

He followed Rodas and Tamara out of the door into the hallway and into a brilliantly lit room of white tiles and other hard surfaces. The air stank of burnt flesh and ozone and some disinfectant that smelled like stomach acid. Rodas bade Danlo to lay Jonathan on a large chair in the centre of the room. This gleaming black machine — there was no other word for it — adjusted itself to fit the angles of Jonathan's small, contracted body. Although it looked forbidding, with its covering of scleen plastic, a soft, thermal inner gel provided Jonathan with heat as well as a relative degree of comfort.

"Mama, Mama," Jonathan said, looking up at Tamara.

Rodas covered Jonathan's naked body with a plain white sheet. He apologized for having no clean coverings that Tamara and Danlo might wear, nor any way of providing them means to wash. All his disinfectant, he said, had to be saved for the chair and various objects in the room, and, of course, his cutting tools.

"These are barbaric times," he said. "But we'll do what we can."

He bade Danlo hold down Jonathan's upper body and positioned Tamara over the boy's legs. After swabbing the ankle area with a little of the strong-smelling disinfectant, he strapped a nerve block to Jonathan's right leg just above the knee. This long, black curving computer looked something like a piece of body armour that one might wear for a particularly vicious game of hokkee. But, in theory, it would generate a powerful field that would block all signals running up the nerves of Jonathan's leg. If all went well, Jonathan should feel almost no sensation below his knee and certainly no pain.

"We're almost ready," Rodas said.

He rolled one of his Fostora-made surgical robots up to the right side of the table. This was a great, glittering thing of lasers and needles and many kinds of diamond-steel drills and saws. Its fifty tentacle-like arms could be fitted with retractors and suctors and clamps — or fibre-opticals or tlolts or any of the other ten thousand tools that might be used upon a person's flesh. Most importantly, these arms might be programmed for various surgical tasks. As Danlo leaned gently on Jonathan's shoulders and pressed him down against the table, Rodas snapped various tools on to the hands of each arm and made the proper programming. Then he looked hard at Danlo and Tamara and said, "Please don't let the boy move."

Now Danlo leaned harder against Jonathan, while Tamara fairly lay across Jonathan's thighs to hold his lower legs. Jonathan looked up at Danlo and said, "Please, Father — don't let him hurt me."

At first, all went well. Rodas began with the right foot. His plan was to take it off just below the joint, thereby leaving the bone intact to make a regrowth easier. He activated the robot, and it suddenly went to work in a fury of flashing steel and pulsing lasers. The many robot arms performed an intricate dance, circling Jonathan's leg like so many writhing snakes. Their co-ordination was unbelievable. Tiny scalpels cut through skin, nerves, tendons and ligaments while the lasers worked to cauterize the severed blood vessels. During the two minutes of this surgery, Jonathan experienced little pain. The worst of it, for him, was the weight of Danlo and Tamara holding his curled-up body straight. And, of course, the sounds: steel whirring against the tendons; the suck of cartilage being pulled apart; and the hissing of the lasers as their heat vaporized Jonathan's blood. A stench of ozone and cooked flesh mixed with the rot of gangrene and enveloped the table. Danlo could no more escape this terrible smell than he could avoid looking down into Jonathan's eyes or quiet the hammering of his own heart. His heart beat quickly a hundred and eighty-four times before Rodas said, "Very good," and turned off the robot. He could feel his own blood pulsing up through his throbbing head, and down along his spine, through his legs and into his feet.

"Please, Father — is he finished yet?"

As it happened, Rodas had finished with the right foot. With a loud thump, he cast the blackened member unceremoniously into a waste container. Then he moved towards the nerve block and told Tamara and Danlo, "I'm sorry, I only have one of these — hold him tightly, now."

As he unfastened the nerve block and moved to strap it to Jonathan's other leg, Jonathan's whole body suddenly contracted as if jolted with electricity. "Oh, oh!" he cried out. "It hurts, it hurts!"

Rodas rolled the robot over to the other side of the table while Danlo caught Jonathan's eyes and told him that the pain wouldn't last long. And Tamara began singing him a song to take his mind off the fire eating away at the stump at the end of his leg:

Little child, little child,
Dancing down the starry Wild.

"Barbaric," Rodas muttered as he made a slight adjustment in the robot's programming. "It's barbaric that I should have no drugs to give him."

But it seemed that Jonathan's pain might be just bearable and the worst of his torment over. He lay against the table listening to Tamara's singing, all the while gripping Danlo's arms with his little hands, moaning and gasping for air and trying to be brave. Danlo wanted to weep at the courage and pain that he saw in his son's eyes, and he was awed by his terrible will to life.

Ti-anasa daivam.

And then Rodas began to cut off the other foot. Once again, cold steel began to bite through skin and bone, and lasers flashed out to touch Jonathan's arteries with their ruby fire. This time, Jonathan jumped at the crunching and sucking sounds of his flesh coming apart, for although he didn't yet feel the pain of it, he knew that he soon would. "Please, Father," he gasped, and the hurt of his right leg became the agony of his left, and there was no difference. Danlo hoped that this time, when the surgery was finished, Rodas might leave the nerve block in place a while longer to ease Jonathan's pain. Or perhaps they might even give him a few coins in exchange for the use of the nerve block for a few days while Jonathan's stumps were healing. Danlo looked down at Jonathan lying so helplessly beneath his weight, and he thought that he would do anything to ease his pain.

Boom, boom, boom.
Danlo counted the beats of his heart and prayed that Rodas might amputate the left foot as quickly as he had the right.
One hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two, one hundred and twenty-three
...

And then, quite suddenly, as Rodas was cutting through the Achilles tendon, the nerve block failed. Rodas would later discover that its power cells had gone dead. But at that moment all he could do was to grit his teeth at the terrible scream that ripped through the room. For the count of three heartbeats, Rodas continued to guide the robot through the great tendon, and Jonathan continued to scream in agony.

Tamara, furiously gripping Jonathan's thrashing legs, looked at the robot's dozens of arms snaking around Jonathan's foot. "Stop it!" she said to Rodas. "Can't you stop it — you're killing him!"

"No — it's almost done," Rodas said. "Another minute, please."

"Ahhh, ahhh, ahhhhh ... "

Boom, boom, boom ...

"Please, please," Tamara begged as the tears flooded her eyes. "Please stop."

Please, Father.

As Danlo pushed down on Jonathan's shoulders, his hands and eyes burned with fire, and he couldn't separate Jonathan's pain from his own. And all the while Jonathan shook his head back and forth, and he never stopped screaming. His eyes had fallen wild and almost mindless, as if they might jump out of his head. But once, between breaths, in gathering strength for a further round of screaming, Jonathan looked up at Danlo in full lucidity. And there was nothing in his eyes except terrible pain and a terrible awareness that he could never escape it.

Please, Father — let me die.

"No, no," Danlo whispered. "No, no, no, no."

It was the worst moment of his life.

After another thirty seconds (thirty years for Danlo, and for Jonathan, thirty thousand), Rodas shut down the robot and stood back from the table. He rubbed a sponge soaked with disinfectant over Jonathan's raw stumps and then sprayed them with bandages of thinskin.

"Mama, Mama, please," Jonathan cried out, "it hurts, it hurts."

"I'm sorry," Rodas said as he unfastened the nerve block and examined it with disgust. "But new power cells are impossible to come by these days."

Tamara dressed Jonathan, then, and held him. She sat on the far end of the table (that part not spattered with tiny bone fragments and blood), all the while rocking back and forth and holding her head against his as she resumed her song:

Come and play, come and play,
Dancing down the Milky Way.

This quieted Jonathan, a little. He sat in Tamara's lap, shaking and murmuring in pain. He seemed not to care what had happened to his feet. It took all his strength simply to look up at Tamara and say, "Please, Mama — take me home."

At a nod from the cutter, Danlo wrapped him in his white bed furs. He stood by the bloody, black chair looking at Jonathan and trying to get his breathing right.

"Do you live far from here?" Rodas asked.

"No, only a few blocks."

"Good. Keep the boy as warm as you can, and make him drink, even if he doesn't want to. I don't think that he'll fall into shock but ... "

"Yes?"

"There's a great danger of infection — do you understand?"

Danlo inclined his head once. And then he asked Rodas, "Is there nothing you can give him, then?"

"No, I'm afraid not. The whole city is empty of drugs."

"I see."

"I'm sorry," Rodas said. He laid his hand on Danlo's shoulder. "But the boy is strong, so don't lose hope."

After that, Danlo and Tamara put on their furs. Tamara gave Jonathan into Danlo's arms and led them back to the outer room where the harijan woman still waited for Rodas to rid her of her baby. (The exemplar, it seemed, had decided to seek the services of a less busy cutter.) When they went out into the street, they found that it had finally begun to snow: tiny, broken flakes of
raishay
as cold as death. The sky was all closed-in grey and clouds of swirling white. They skated in silence back through the snowswept streets to Tamara's apartment. None of the other people hurrying through the storm greeted them or even looked their way. It didn't take them very long to trudge up the tenement's stone steps, to walk down the hallway, close themselves behind a hard, shatterwood door and put Jonathan to bed.

They spent the next day simply caring for Jonathan. Tamara made him many pots of blood tea and sang him songs. Once, she ventured to cook up a bear steak dripping with juice and fat, but Jonathan couldn't stomach such a rich food. It was left to Danlo to eat the meat, and this he did. He did all that he could to keep up. his strength so that he might devote himself to his son. Mostly, when Jonathan wasn't sleeping, he told him stories about the animals' adventures during the first days of the world and played his flute for him. Although Jonathan cried out often at the pain of his throbbing stumps — a soft, murmuring music of his own — sometimes he fell into a silence as vast and deep as the sea. His eyes glazed like ice over water, and he seemed to be looking inside himself at a dark, desolate place towards which no one could journey except himself. Then Danlo would breathe deeply and count the beats of his heart; then he would look upon Jonathan with all the light of his love and pray for him.

Early the following morning, Danlo and Tamara learned of something that only further darkened their spirits. It had nothing to do with Jonathan, at least not directly. A lightship arrived at the Hollow Fields, and its pilot, Faxon Bey, like a leper carrying a plague, brought news that almost no one wanted to hear. He told of another skirmish fought between the Fellowship fleet and that of the Ringists: it seemed that the pilot-captain named Bardo, in command of two battle groups, had nearly destroyed a full cadre of Ringist ships out near the Orlenda Double. And worse, on the planet Cilehe, the Ringists and their enemies had used laser satellites against each other and exploded hydrogen bombs; they had released both info and biological viruses to infect human beings and the computers upon which their lives depended. Faxon Bey said that at least seventy million people had died. And this wasn't the worst of his news. As he reported to the Lord of the Order, Audric Pall, the planet Helaku High was no more. Its star had fallen supernova, instantly vaporizing five billion people and everything else that lived there. And it was almost certain that Bertram Jaspari's Iviomils, with their
morrashar
, had caused the supernova. The rumour spreading through Neverness like some wild plague held that the Iviomils were waging a war of vengeance. Or perhaps they were campaigning for Bertram Jaspari's release. Since they hadn't been able to approach the Star of Neverness, they had taken their terror elsewhere. They had fallen quite mad, of course, and everyone feared that they would destroy the Civilized Worlds one by one if they weren't themselves destroyed first.