Ascending - James Alan Gardner [67]
“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.”
“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