BETWEEN WORLDS
BETWEEN WORLDS
I had nothing to do but worry. Telling people not to worry while they’re in a situation like this was sort of like telling people to stop breathing. It couldn’t be done.
I felt the blood spilling from Kit’s temple. I knew—had heard—that head wounds bled a lot. The heart pumped a lot of blood up there, of course. It was where the brain was.
I thought of how Kit hadn’t reacted, hadn’t responded to me even in my mind. He had done it before when he was dying of a chest wound. But now he wasn’t. His brain…
No. I wouldn’t think about it. Just wouldn’t. Eden was far more advanced than Earth in all types of genetic engineering and genetics. It came from not forbidding all tampering with human genes for the last three hundred years—as Earth had after the turmoils.
They could repair types of damage that were fatal on Earth, and I was only starting to suspect—a year after coming to Eden—that people lived far longer here, too. They would be able to heal Kit. He was still alive. He’d survive.
I’d try to do whatever could be done. I crawled around till my knees were under Kit’s head, raising it. Raising a wound was always better, right? I tore a piece off my dress and folded it into a kind of pad, and pushed it hard against his temple. Pressure helped reduce bleeding, right?
Then I thought of his thigh, because it didn’t matter where the blood was flowing from, right? He could die of exsanguination either way. I tore another piece of the dress with my free hand. It was hard to fold it with a single hand, but it could sort of be done. It wasn’t like anyone was going to grade me on my folding. I pushed the rough pad of cloth against his thigh and pressed, pressed as hard as I could.
I don’t think I thought of anything. I could barely breathe. All my mind could form coherently was the certainty that Kit couldn’t die. I heard my own heartbeat pound with a force that seemed to make my body quiver, and I willed Kit’s to beat in unison. It seemed to me that I could feel it, too, echoing just behind mine.
It seemed to me the blood flow diminished and I hoped it was the pressure and not that Kit was dying, and it seemed like no time at all and eternity, all at once, and then there was a wavering light, and then, closer, the doctor, running, with a lantern affixed to his head, in the way that miners used to wear lamps on their foreheads in old period holos.
He ran much better than any man his age should be able to, his movements contrasting with his wrinkled face and his gnomic appearance.
He fell to his knees next to Kit and his breathing was labored and loud. I don’t think he even looked at me, as his hand went first to right over Kit’s heart, then he sat back on his heels, and reached into his black bag which he’d dropped by his side, and got out the lens implement, and looked through it, then tossed it aside, letting it clatter to the floor of the tunnel and reached into his bag again.
He had to pry my hands away from both Kit’s temple and Kit’s thigh, and he used something that looked like tiny squares of dimatough, which stuck to the skin, on top of the wound. It looked like he was taping Kit’s skin together. The bleeding stopped immediately, and the doctor used an injector on the side of Kit’s neck. There was a response from Kit then, a sort of deep sigh, and for a moment I thought he had died, but he continued breathing.
Doc Bartolomeu looked up at me then. “Are you hurt?”
“I…don’t think so.”
He got the examining instrument from the floor. His hand was stained red, from the puddle there. And there was blood on the side of the instrument, but the doctor didn’t pay any attention, as he put it to his eye and looked through it. “No,” he said, with finality. “You’re fine.”
I nodded and said, “Kit…He…bled a lot.”
“He won’t die from the bleeding,” Doc Bartolomeu said. “I’ve given him something to speed up blood production. He might be a little anemic, but he’ll be fine. I need to get him to my flyer soon, though. Ah. There they are.”
As though on cue, just then, there were more lights coming down the hallway, the sound of running footsteps. For a moment I thought it was our attackers returning, then recognized Zen, ahead of them, followed by…yes. Jean and Bruno. They had a little antigrav platform between them, and were maneuvering it at about hip high.
Jean turned about as pale as spilt milk when he saw us, but the voice in which he asked Doc, “Okay to move him?” was perfectly calm.
“Yes. We need to get him to my place fast,” he said.
Jean and Bruno managed it, though Kit was taller than either of them, and I suspected weighed more than either of them too. They managed it quickly and without seeming to strain, lifting him one at the shoulders and one at the knees and at the same time somehow maneuvering the platform under him.
Zen gathered up tools the doctor had let fall in the blood pool on the floor, and put them in a bag, then inside his big black bag, which she picked up to follow him.
Bruno turned back and said, “Thena?”
I tried to get up. There was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to get up. “Are you?” Bruno asked.
“No, she’s not,” the doctor said, and in his tone of voice there was just the barest hint that I was being a weakling, and weak for no reason.
I managed to get to my feet, but my legs buckled under me, and I heard my teeth chatter, and realized I was shaking, and then I was furious at myself, and felt like I was a weakling and malingering for no reason. Kit was ill. Kit was struggling between life and death, and I was being an idiot and having issues standing up.
“Can you handle it?” Bruno asked, and it was obvious he was talking about the antigrav platform and of course they could, since Zen and Jean were keeping it level and moving, the lights on their foreheads disappearing in the gloom of the hallway.
Then he said “Easy, easy” to me, and took off his coat, and put it around my shoulders. I wanted to tell him I was sure that though I felt cold, I couldn’t really be cold, but I couldn’t talk and if I tried it, my chattering teeth were going to chop my tongue in half. He put his hand around my waist and led me after the others down the hallway. “It’s reaction,” he told me. “It’s just reaction.”
It wasn’t till we were outside, and sitting on the back of what I thought was Doc’s mobile treatment center flyer, that I looked down at myself and realized I was covered in blood everywhere I could see. Kit’s blood.
And then I vomited.