We Are Both Mammals, Page 2

  I looked around a little, trying to orient myself. I glanced at the hose lying on the mattress to my right, and it led my eye to the thurga. He was awake, and watching me silently with those round, bright, dark eyes. Feeling self-conscious, I glanced down again at the hose that lay between us. I noticed this time that it had a sort of small but strong-looking clamp of black plastic, with what looked like some inner workings of steel, that seemed to encircle the hose, about a hand’s breadth away from the bandages on my side. There was another clamp near the thurga’s end of the hose; and I registered for the first time that it joined us. The thurga and I were linked to each other by this hose.

  Something anxious arose in my brain. Why? Why were we linked by a hose? I did not understand; and the numbness and aching and soreness suddenly seemed more intense.

  There was silence in the room, aside from the soft hissing and some electronic humming that I had not consciously noticed before. Everyone was watching me. Something was wrong here; there was something that I was missing. My brain knew it, my body seemed to know it, and I seemed to feel instinctively that everyone else in this room knew it, but my weakened, foggy mind lagged behind.

  “Can I have some more water,” I mumbled.

  The male nurse helped me to drink again, and weariness came upon me. I lay back, and must have slept. I seem to recall hearing faintly, as I drifted off, one of the nurses saying, “Nope; he’s gone.”

  In the darkness, perhaps as my sleep lightened to a doze for a time, I heard voices. I thought I heard one of them say, He’s going to have to realise it at some point, but I did not know about whom they were speaking. When I woke again, it was once again daylight.

  This time there were no nurses in the room. I had woken gently, and I lay still, listening to my own soft breathing. The dull aching in my body was still present, and though I felt sleepy I also felt a little more coherent than previously. There was light in the room, coming from the window on my left, which had its curtains partially drawn: the light had a soft, almost golden glow to it that I eventually registered meant that it was late afternoon. The clock on the wall confirmed this.

  I wanted to drink, and rather than pressing the pad near my right hand to summon a nurse, I tried slowly lifting my left hand, with the drip in it, to reach the cup for myself. I succeeded, though my whole arm was shaky and weak, and I emptied the cup, which had only a few mouthfuls in it. The cool water was delicious. I would have liked more, but I could not reach the jug that stood on the tall white bedside cabinet.

  After this tremendous and triumphant exertion, I lay still for a few minutes, resting drowsily, the lightweight disposable plastic cup clutched loosely in my hand. Replacing it on the bedside cabinet did not seem worth the effort required.

  At length, I decided that I wanted to see my environment properly, and mustered my energy.

  Blinking slowly, I looked around sluggishly, from left to right, trying to take in my surroundings properly for the first time. The room was spacious, with its light blue walls that I had noticed earlier. The bed sheets were white, the blankets cream coloured. In fact it was not one bed but two: two hospital beds pushed flush together, I in one and the dark-furred body of the thurga, mostly covered by the bedclothes, in the other. I noticed that the bedclothes of each bed were not tucked under their respective mattresses where the beds abutted: they lay loose, overlapping slightly. The electrical cord that led to the pad by my right hand snaked up from between the mattresses. Beyond the beds, to the right, a large, lightweight, pale blue curtain screened off the rest of the room.

  I remembered the thurga’s dark eyes gazing at me, and I decided to take a proper look at my bed companion. I turned my head carefully to look at him.

  I found that he was already gazing at me. Big, round, dark, liquid eyes; elegant, dark whiskers on either side of a small, round, dark nose; dark brown, soft-looking fur that covered his body except for where he was shaven. The thurga’s face was pointed and possum-like, and on top of his soft-furred head his ears were like a cat’s: pointed and neat, with long, fine, protective fur at their openings. A small but noticeable tuft of soft black hair crested each ear. His hands – which is what the thurga-a call the appendages at the ends of their forelimbs, paw-like though they look to humans – rested on the covers, and were covered in very fine short fur that was much paler than the fur on the rest of the body; almost beige. Thurga hands have an opposable thumb, but always remind me of a rat’s forepaws: delicate, dextrous, with small thin claws, and soft pink fleshy pads underneath, and though they are differently proportioned to human hands, and used for locomotion as much as for gripping or holding, there is a finesse about their design that really does make them hand-like.

  The rest of the thurga’s body was hidden under the bedclothes. I could just see part of the shaven skin peeking above the white sheet. Having briefly studied what I could see of the thurga, I met his gaze properly.

  “Hello,” I croaked; greeting him of my own volition at last, after spending who knew how many days in bed alongside him.

  “Hello, Daniel,” the creature replied.

  Its voice was so soft and gentle; low in pitch and quiet in tone, it reminded me of the purr of a cat. Its small, sharp white teeth and pink tongue were visible in glimpses as it formed the English words.

  For a moment, all I could do was process in silence my current situation: here I was, in bed, in a hospital, after a near-fatal accident that I did not seem to remember, lying next to an unfamiliar thurga who had apparently undergone the same surgery that I had. Presumably, the surgeons had operated on us both on the same day, or something, and had put us in beds side by side to make nursing us easier.

  I swallowed, trying to wet my throat again, and tried weakly to clear it. “What was your accident?”

  I didn’t think there had been any thurga-a in the laboratory at the time of the accident; we didn’t have any thurga technicians; so presumably this thurga’s accident had been different from mine.

  The thurga laughed slightly: a little chuckling sound that sounded like it came from deep in its belly. “I didn’t have one,” he said simply.

  I swallowed again, frowning slightly. “Then why … did you have surgery?” The nurses and surgeon had said that this thurga had undergone the same surgery that I had; if he hadn’t been in an accident, what had happened to him?

  His big dark eyes held mine. “Because of you.”

  I blinked several times, nonplussed.

  “Daniel, your organs were damaged almost beyond repair.” The thurga paused, as though giving me time to assimilate this. “Your internal organs can no longer function on their own.”

  I frowned in puzzlement. As the thurga was speaking, the feeling of sick dread had begun to rise again in me. There was something here that I did not understand.

  “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 t
he 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 par
t 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.”