We Are Both Mammals (3 page)

“
My organs are assisting
yours,” the thurga said, still in his soft, gentle tones. “This
hose between us is helping us.”

I stared. My heart had begun to pound, and I
still did not know why. I swallowed, and, with all the strength I
could muster, I let go of the disposable cup and – with difficulty
– pushed back the bedclothes to reveal the hose that lay beneath
them. The flimsy plastic cup toppled lightly to the floor. I barely
noticed that the thurga helped by pushing off his own bedclothes
with his small hands.

I stared at the hose that lay on the
mattresses between us. Now I saw that it contained multiple smaller
hoses within it, and each small transparent hose carried a fluid of
some kind – fluids that looked like blood, or bile, or gastric
juices …

This hose, as thick as my
thumb, ran directly from my side to his. It fed out of my body and
into his. And out of his and into mine. It was not like the other,
smaller, fluid-bearing hoses that led away from my body into
various drains or drips or containers. It
joined
us.

The bodily fluids in that hose were not mine
alone.

My internal organs were linked to the
thurga’s.

I started to breathe heavily, and the
movement of my ribs hurt. This was the thing. This was the dread
secret that my brain had known and I had not. Speechless in horror,
I stared at the thurga, whose dark round eyes returned my gaze
levelly. Nausea seized me. My brain reeled. My vision started to go
dark. I gasped for breath, and within a moment I had fainted.

When I woke again, I felt very sick. I
deliberately kept my eyes shut. It was all I could do to breathe
slowly, quietly, and shallowly. I sensed daylight of some kind, but
did not want to open my eyes.

I could not think about what I had just
learned.

I heard distant voices; probably the nurses;
but I deliberately shut my ears to them, refusing to hear anything.
I was thankful when I felt myself drifting into dark
unconsciousness again.

Even as I slumbered in the darkness of my
skull, I knew that I could not sleep forever. At some point I was
going to wake and be confronted with things that I did not want to
know.

Why had I had to have an
accident? Why had any of this had to happen?
Why
was I lying in a hospital bed after
almost dying? It wasn’t right; I hadn’t signed up for any of that.
It was a gross inconvenience; a gross imposition upon my life. Who
had given permission for such a thing? Certainly not I.

I blinked, and found myself awake, though
dopey.

It was early morning: the room was gloomy.
There were no nurses in the room. The clock read twenty-five
minutes past five.

I kept my eyes straight ahead, jaw set,
regarding the clock as though it were extremely important that I
study it. If I never had to look to my right again, that would suit
me just fine.

For twenty minutes, in silence, I stared at
that clock, and I am not sure that I blinked more than five times.
I was thirsty, again, but I almost felt that if I moved at all
something would happen – something would awake, and notice me, or
realise that I was awake and address me, or the nurses would come
and draw my attention to something … I closed my eyes tight, and
even that felt like a huge, obvious gesture.

I could not remain still forever. Much as I
wanted to know nothing, to never have to think about anything
frightening ever again, that was not a viable option.

I screwed my eyes shut as hard as they would
go.

–––––––

In the following days, I could scarcely bear to
glance to my right.

The human and thurga surgeons who had
performed the surgery spent hours examining us, discussing us
between themselves, scanning, making notes and taking photographs.
They, and the nurses, would fiddle with the hose that lay between
us, apparently adjusting the two small clamps that I had noticed,
and often they would plug a thin electrical cord into a tiny socket
in one or other of the clamps and take readings of some kind via a
handheld device. Sometimes I was conscious of their attentions;
sometimes not. I still spent most of my time asleep or in an odd,
dozing, ‘in between’ state, wherein I was not really aware of much
but a single definite sound could wake me fully.

I recall that the creature tried to speak to
me a couple of times, but I was in such shock that I could barely
register that he was speaking, let alone comprehend his words or
identify what language he was using. It was as though my brain did
not want to hear; nor did it want me to be fully awake.

I was informed by the surgeons
that the thurga in the bed with me – the thurga who was
attached
to me – was
male, like me, and one hundred and two seasons old. I was too
foggy-headed at the time to think about this, but I realised later
that this made him fully grown but young – a young adult. At
thirty Earth-years old, I was probably a little older than
he.

The creature’s name was Vi-i-a Toro-a Ni-Ev.
Eventually it sank into my fuddled brain that, according to thurga
culture, this meant I should call him ‘Vi-i-a’ if I were referring
to him and his whole family, or ‘Toro-a-Ba’ – the thurga equivalent
of ‘Mr Toro-a’ – if I wished to address him personally. I could
drop the honorific ‘-Ba’ suffix if ever he gave me permission to do
so. I wondered vaguely why I had been told his third name, his
‘private name’, but I was too groggy and distressed to care.

I had now spent three weeks in hospital – or
rather, at the clinic of Surgeon Ziina Suva-a, a thurga surgeon and
specialist in the thurga digestive system. Most of that time I had
spent unconscious.

In dribs and drabs, as I became lucid enough
to ask questions and comprehend the answers, I learned what had
happened. I and a few other laboratory technicians had been working
on new additions to one of the industrial laser-imaging machines at
my workplace. Staff at the clinic seemed to be unclear on the
details, and I was not yet well enough to receive visits from my
co-workers, so I could not determine exactly how the accident had
occurred, but something had gone wrong with the bracing or
suspension of the machine and it had fallen on the technician
underneath it: me.

Mortally wounded, and unconscious from
shock, I had been rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital.
There I was pronounced unsaveable: the internal organs of my
abdomen, especially my intestines, gall bladder, stomach, kidneys
and liver, were damaged beyond repair, and to replace all of them
simultaneously with synthetic organs or transplants would be too
much of a strain on my body. My death was expected within hours;
the kindest thing that could be done for me was to keep me sedated
and unconscious until I died of my injuries, sparing me the pain of
waking.

It happened, however, that Surgeon Fong was
at that hospital visiting someone – an intern, or something, of
hers who was there for work experience. Apparently Fong and Suva-a
had worked together previously on multiple occasions and had
discussed personal theories they had both been developing, and upon
hearing of my admittance to the hospital Fong asked to see me; not,
I gathered, expecting to be able to save me, just out of
professional curiosity. When she saw me, however, she saw an
opportunity to test a radical surgical theory of hers and Surgeon
Suva-a’s. If the surgery was a success, which it would probably not
be, I would live. If not, my fate would be the same: death while
unconscious. Either way, the opportunity for discovery and
experimentation was rich. Surgeon Fong literally ran to the head of
the hospital and presented her request.

The hospital would have contacted my next of
kin to ask for their consent, but I have none. Since I was a dead
man anyway, and if I died during the surgery I would still die
under anaesthetic and therefore painlessly, the hospital gave
permission. One of the delightful things, I have noticed, about the
thurga-a is that with them decision-making is very simple. They do
not pursue bureaucracy or excessive paperwork nor even undue
deliberation: an informed decision is made quickly and simply, and
that is that.

However, the surgery required a thurga
volunteer. Here, again, thurga culture differs greatly from human:
if anyone asked for a perfectly healthy and free human being to
volunteer for experimental surgery that carried a certain risk of
lethal failure, and which, if it succeeded, would result in
unnatural deformity, disability, and extraordinary dependence on a
stranger of an alien species, there would be no volunteers. Among
Surgeon Suva-a’s staff, however, was a thurga intern named Vi-i-a
Toro-a Ni-Ev.

I could not begin to contemplate what had
made this creature volunteer. It could only have been some kind of
madness.

And so, while I was unconscious and
unknowing, and unconsenting, my crushed body was pieced together as
well as it could be, using grafts, transplants and synthetic
materials to bolster my own shattered organs, and a hose was
constructed and inserted that would carry fluids from certain of my
organs to and from the same of Vi-i-a Toro-a’s. It was an extremely
laborious and difficult procedure, utilising several techniques
that had never been performed before; any one of which, if it
failed, would spell my death and possibly Toro-a’s. Three surgeons,
plus anaesthetists, nurses and various assistants, under the
leadership of Surgeons Fong and Suva-a, worked on us for
twenty-five hours.

And then they waited for us to recover.

Toro-a-Ba awoke first, naturally, and it
became clear that he would survive.

I, on the other hand, was unconscious for
two weeks.

It was a scheduled part of my recovery: any
stress on my internal organs, such as the vomiting that naturally
occurs after general anaesthesia, could not be allowed. My body had
been dying: I had suffered massive trauma to the digestive system
and other internal organs as well as my abdominal muscles,
unavoidably major blood loss during surgery, and my body was being
tenuously held together by sutures and bandages. Waking could
actually inhibit my recovery. So I was kept comatose, and monitored
closely for two weeks, an oxygen mask ensuring that I continued to
breathe, and various machines taking charge of certain bodily
functions, until the surgeons were satisfied that my body was
starting down the long path to healing. Then, gradually, the drugs
were diminished, the machines removed one by one as my body resumed
its functions, and eventually I had woken: bleary, shell-shocked,
and barely able to perceive anything.

From then on I had drifted in and out of
consciousness for a week. This was due partly to the drugs causing
drowsiness, and partly to my body’s own need to sleep so that it
could heal.

I learned later that a psychologist had
recommended that I be kept sedated during the night so that I would
not discover the hose in the darkness and panic, perhaps thinking
it a nightmare – only to wake in the daylight and find it to
be true.

I also learned that the painkillers I was
being dosed with were so strong that they numbed not only pain but
many other sensations as well, particularly those associated with
motion. This was one of the reasons why the nurses had advised me
not to move much: my body was so numb that it simply could not tell
what it was doing.

All of the hoses and bandages attached to me
were temporary … except one.

It was explained to me by Surgeon Fong that,
since the surgery appeared to have been a success, it seemed
probable that so long as Toro-a-Ba remained alive, I would too.

“
However.” The surgeon
paused briefly. “Being a thurga, Toro-a-Ba will not live as long as
you do, Daniel. They have shorter lifespans than we humans do, of
course. When Toro-a-Ba dies, unless technology has improved to a
state that means we can save you, you will die too.”

The surgeon paused again. “The extra strain
on Toro-a-Ba’s systems may mean that he doesn’t live as long as he
normally might have.

“
So what all this means is
that Toro-a-Ba has given you some extra time. Maybe extra
years.

“
And the pair of you have
given us a wonderful chance to experiment; we have learnt a
tremendous amount from this procedure. We will be able to apply
that to other scenarios, and as we keep studying you we will learn
even more.”

I gazed at the white-coated woman blankly.
When the thurga beside me died, I would die too.

It took a long moment for my dazed brain to
process this.

My lifespan had been shortened. I would now
live no longer than a thurga. A short-lived thurga. I had been
given ‘maybe extra years’.

I stared, speechless.

Acknowledging my expression, Fong gave a
slight, rueful smile, and a tiny shrug. “It’s longer than you would
have had if we had not performed this surgery.

“
When you came in, Daniel,
you were a dead man. We did all this so that you might have a shot
at surviving, and if it worked, it would be a procedure that we
could use on others in future. So any life you have now … is a
bonus. It’s life you would not have had if we hadn’t hooked you up
to Toro-a-Ba.”

I sank the back of my head more deeply into
the pillow. The now-familiar nausea was beginning to creep back
into me. My life was borrowed. It was not my own. The thurga beside
me was the only thing keeping me alive. And my life was shortened:
when that furry creature died, I would die too. His life and mine
were tied together.

Just as our bodies were.
Because
our bodies
were.