Ascending - James Alan Gardner [68]
“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 whirring 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 all: he examined my picture on the table, while I stood bored at his elbow. And instead of praising my beauty or 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