Chapter
13
He came to himself in bits and pieces, and in tremendous pain. Everything hurt. Pain knifed his brain; his throat was raw and felt bloody. His lungs burned. There was something hard in his mouth and down his throat and when he tried to swallow, he couldn’t.
Then he heard a weird gasping groan like the wheeze of an old bellows. There was a gabble of voices, all overlapping, like the conversation of too many people in too small a space—or maybe that was a memory. He couldn’t tell. But there was someone, a woman, telling him not to fight the tube: Don’t fight, try not to fight, try to relax, let us help you…
His eyelids peeled apart, slowly. Light, too bright, out of the corner of his right eye. The light hurt. Felt like a red-hot poker jammed into his eyes. Bed. Pillow under his head. Bars to either side. Linens and something scratchy on his right arm. Blanket, maybe. Something in his mouth. That queer grunt of air, pulling in, pushing out. His chest rising. Falling…
Falling. He remembered falling. And he remembered blood in his eyes, the iron taste of it in his mouth. The crawl of blood on his neck, dripping from his fingers. He also remembered the moment the runabout shattered in an agonized squall of metal shear that spiked his brain at the same time that a steely vice of panic squeezed his chest. He remembered the way his lungs exploded with pain as superheated air and gases scorched his throat and boiled away his voice so there was no sound when he screamed.
Runabout…gone…Elizabeth…
He must’ve moved because something stirred in the darkness. Movement to his left. He tracked it with his eyes, and then he saw the opaque white of a tube attached to a machine.
Ventilator. Tube down my throat; what’s wrong with my lungs? He realized now that he was hooked to a machine that breathed for him. He didn’t like it; he wanted that tube out; except when he tried to raise his arms, he couldn’t move.
And then he panicked. Maybe he didn’t have arms anymore; he couldn’t feel them, and he was so cold, and there was the machine breathing for him. Fear clutched his chest, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe at all, despite the machine. He was back in the runabout, superheated air scorching his throat and he couldn’t even scream…
“Easy, easy. Relax.” A woman’s voice, and then she materialized out of the shadows: a shoulder-length fall of dark-brown hair framing a square chin, full lips, and brown eyes, but her skin was dark, an odd shade of blue, and there was something about her eyes, something not right…
“Listen to me.” She put a hand on his shoulder, and that slight touch made him feel better. “My name is Dr. Kahayn. You’re in a hospital. You were very badly hurt. We had to put in a tube to help you breathe. I kept you sedated because you kept trying to pull the tube out. You’re in restraints. That’s why you can’t move, but I didn’t want you to panic and pull out the tube before I could explain. Your lungs are better now, and that’s why I let the sedative wear off so you’d wake up and I could take out the tube. Do you understand? Nod if you understand.”
He nodded.
“Good.” She gently tugged tape free from his mouth. “This is going to be unpleasant. You’re going to feel like you can’t breathe for a second. But I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you, so just relax and then it will be better, I promise.”
It was more than unpleasant. It was awful. A sensation of plastic slithering at the back of his throat, like a long, rigid snake and he gagged, tried to pull away, but then the tube was gone.
“Take it easy,” she said. Turning aside, she flicked a switch and the ventilator wheezed to a halt. “Deep, regular breaths. That’s better. But your throat probably hurts. Would you like some ice chips? You’ll feel better.”
She fed him ice chips on a spoon, one at a time; told him to take it slow and suck the chips not chew them. The melting ice eased the pain in his throat, and he thought he’d never tasted anything more wonderful. When he nodded that he’d had enough, she put aside the cup of chips and then unbuckled the leather restraints tethering his wrists to the bed.
Then she said, “What’s your name?”
It took him a few seconds to get the words out, his throat was that raw; it felt like knives cutting him to pieces in there, and it hurt to talk. “Bashir,” he managed, finally, and he was shocked at how weak he sounded. “Julian…Bashir.” He swallowed to wet his throat. “How…how long…have…”
“Three weeks,” she said, and then as his shock must’ve spread to his face, she added, “You would’ve regained consciousness much sooner, but I had to keep you under sedation because of the tube.”
“Tube…how bad?”
She explained his injuries: parenchymal damage and pulmonary congestion from breathing in smoke and superheated gases; a concussion; a broken nose. “And that cut on your forehead was pretty bad. Went way up into your scalp, like you’d smashed into something.”
“My…” He raised his fingers to his scalp, felt a ridge of stippled flesh jutting from bristles because they’d shaved part of his head to cut at the gash. Then he saw that a tube snaked along his left forearm and was attached to a bag of clear fluid hanging from a metal pole next to his bed. “What…what’s . . ?”
“An intravenous line. You have another one running in under your collarbone on the right, under all those bandages. You keep down fluids today, and I’ll pull the central line tonight. If you’re still doing well tomorrow and can keep down soft foods, I’ll pull the other IV.” She paused. “You lost a lot of blood. You’ve been very sick. You’re lucky you’re not dead. But you’re bound to feel pretty weak and awful for a while, and you’ll be short of breath for a bit because of the damage to your lungs, even though they’re much better. So take it easy and go slow.” She paused. “Your scalp wound was very bad. You’re lucky you didn’t bleed to death.”
His head was whirling. Intubation…ventilator and intravenous lines…like being in a museum…Then, another thought, this one much worse, and he felt a sudden clench of dread: She’s a doctor. I’m in a hospital and she’s a doctor. She saved my life, but that mean’s she examined me; she’s given me replacement fluids and drugs, so she must know…
She cut into his thoughts. “What happened? Do you remember?”
“I…” He paused, as much to gather his thoughts as form the words. “Accident. My vehicle…crashed. A fire. I don’t remember much.” Then he thought of something. “Did you…I was with…a woman. A friend. Did you…?”
“No. You were the only one brought in.”
Elizabeth. He wasn’t prepared for how he felt: an emptiness in his chest, a feeling of grief. Guilt, too. My fault; I should’ve listened to her. My fault we were separated…
“Do you know where you are? That is, do you know the name of this hospital?” When Bashir shook his head, she said, “You’re in Rangdron Medical Complex of the Kornak Armed Forces.” She paused as if that should mean something, but he didn’t know what. So he didn’t say anything.
Instead, he studied her face again. That blue skin. Very familiar. Not Andorian, though, or Bolian. But familiar. And there was something wrong with her left eye…
“This is a secured facility,” she said. “There are guards on the perimeter, and you need to have built up enough credits to be let in at the main gate. The underground trams are monitored.”
“Yes,” he wheezed. He didn’t know what else to say. That left eye. Not tracking as well with the right. No blood vessels. That eye’s artificial, some kind of prosthetic…
“You’re quite different,” she said. “For a Kornak, I mean. You don’t have any prosthetics.”
“Been…been lucky.” It was the only thing he could think to say.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. You’re not from around here.”
Even whispering hurt. “No, you’re right. I’m from…from very far away. North.” He tried to remember what Elizabeth had said about the planet. Was there one northern continent, or two? He risked it. “From the northern continent. This is the first time I’ve…I’ve been here.”
But she gave a regretful shake of her head. “That’s not true and that’s not what I meant. You know that. Now, I know that you’re not Kornak, or Jabari, or any of the Outlier tribes. You’re…different. Then there’s the matter of your suit. And that uniform you were wearing.”
“My…?” he began, then stopped. She meant his environmental suit. He tried thinking of something that would explain the suit away and his uniform but couldn’t. So he said nothing.
She waited for a moment, maybe to give him time to think of some new lie. Then she nodded as if confirming something for herself. “Right. Thanks for not insulting my intelligence.” She paused. “You’re not…from here.”
He was silent.
“At first, I thought maybe you were a mutant. But I discarded that. See, by definition, most mutants don’t work well. Like a machine where the blueprints get all mixed up, so that what you finally build doesn’t work very well. But you work. You’re injured, and it’s pretty serious. But your body’s healing. Everything in your body, from your organs to your chemistries…they all work efficiently, neatly. And your brain’s even better than that. So you work.”
He said nothing.
“Right,” she said. “And then there’s the not-so-little matter of your anatomy. Your skin color, your heart, that left lung of yours. Your blood, like you’re used to and require a lot more oxygen.” She touched the ventilator by his bed, and there was a tiny click and a whirr because, he saw now, her left hand was artificial, too. “More carbon dioxide as a respiratory trigger, too. That threw me. You were having trouble one day and I hyperventilated you, blew down your carbon dioxide level and you flat-out quit breathing. That gave me another big scare.”
“Another?” he whispered.
“Yah. You tried dying in my emergency room, and very actively I might add. Then I realized that your central respiratory system needs a higher set point of carbon dioxide to initiate breathing. Anytime I tried going for what’s normal—what’s normal for me and everyone else here—your body tried to die. So you’re different, Julian Bashir. You are very different.”
He said nothing.
“That’s right.” She inhaled, let the breath go. “Like I said. Different. Not one of us. So, I think we need to talk about this, Julian Bashir.” She cocked her head to one side. “Don’t you?”
TO BE CONTINUED…