Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

But he had never had a case of killer-fungus infestation to handle. All Lawler knew about it was what he had heard from his father long ago or learned by talking to doctors on other islands. Would the stethoscope really be able to tell him, he wondered, what might or might not have taken up residence in her lungs?

“Turn around,” he said.

He listened to the sounds of her back. He had her raise her arms and pressed his fingers against her sides, feeling for alien growths. She wriggled as though he were tickling her. He drew a blood sample from her arm, and sent her behind the screen in the corner of the room to give him a urine specimen. Lawler had a microscope of sorts, which Sweyner the toolmaker had fashioned for him. It had no more resolution than a toy, but perhaps if there were something living within her he would be able to see it anyway.

He knew so little, really.

His patients were a daily reproach to his skills. Much of the time he simply had to bluff his way. His medical knowledge was a feeble mix of hand-me-downs from his eminent father, desperate guesswork, and hard-won experience, gradually accumulated at his patients” expense. Lawler had been only halfway through his medical education when his father died and he, at not quite twenty, found himself doctor to the island of Sorve. Nowhere on Hydros was there real medical training to be had, or anything that could remotely be considered a modern medical instrument, or any medicines other than those he could compound himself out of marine lifeforms, imagination, and prayers. In his late and great father’s time some charitable organization on Sunrise had dropped packages of medical supplies once in a while, but the packages were few and far between and they had to be shared among many islands. And they had stopped coming long ago. The inhabited galaxy was very large; nobody thought much about the people living on Hydros any more. Lawler did his best, but his best often wasn’t good enough. When he had the chance, he consulted with doctors on other islands, hoping to learn something from them. Their medical skills were just as muddy as his, but he had learned that sometimes by exchanging ignorances with them he could generate a little spark of understanding. Sometimes.

“You can put your shirt back on,” Lawler said.

“Is it the fungus, do you think?”

“All it is is a nervous cough,” he told her. He had the blood sample on the glass slide, now, and was peering at it through the single eyepiece. What was that, red on red? Could they be scarlet mycelial fibres coiling through the crimson haze? No. No. A trick of the eye. This was normal blood. “You’re perfectly all right,” he said, looking up. She was still bare-breasted, her shirt over her skinny arm, frozen in suspense. Her expression was a suspicious one. “Why do you need to think you’ve got a horrible disease?” Lawler asked. “All it is is a cough.”

“I need to think I don’t have a horrible disease. That’s why I came to you.”

“Well, you don’t.” He hoped to God he was right. There was no real reason to think he wasn’t.

He watched her as she dressed, and found himself wondering whether there might actually be something going on between her and Gabe Kinverson. Lawler, who had little interest in island gossip, hadn’t considered that possibility before, and, considering it now, he was startled to observe how uncomfortable he was with it.

He said, “Have you been under any unusual stress lately?”

“Not that I’m aware of, no.”

“Working too hard? Sleeping badly? Love affair that isn’t going well?”

She shot him a peculiar look. “No. On all three.”

“Well, sometimes we get stressed out and we don’t even notice it. The stress becomes built in, part of our routine. What I’m saying is that I think this is a nervous cough.”

“That’s all?” She sounded disappointed.

“You want it to be a killer-fungus infestation? All right, it’s a killer-fungus infestation. When you reach the stage where the wiry red threads are coming out your ears, cover your head in a sack so you don’t upset your neighbours. They might think they were at risk, otherwise. But of course they won’t be, not until you begin giving off spores, and that’ll come much later.”

She laughed. “I didn’t know you were such a comedian.”

“I’m not.” Lawler took her hand in his, wondering whether he was trying to be provocative or simply being avuncular, his Good Old Doc Lawler persona. “Listen,” he said, “I can’t find anything wrong with you physically. So the odds are the cough is just a nervous habit you picked up somehow. Once you start doing it, you irritate the throat linings, the mucosa and such, and the cough starts feeding on itself and gets worse and worse. Eventually it’ll go away on its own, but eventually can be a long time. What I’m going to give you is a neural damper, a tranquillizer drug, something to calm your cough reflex down long enough to let the mechanical irritation subside, so that you’ll stop sending cough signals to yourself.”

That came as a surprise to him too, that he would share the numbweed with her. He had never said a word about it to anyone, let alone prescribed it for a patient. But giving her the drug seemed to be the right thing to do. He had enough to spare.

He took a small dry storage gourd from his cabinet, poured a couple of centilitres of the pink fluid into it, and capped it with a twist of sea-plastic.

“This is a drug I derived myself from numbweed, which is one of the algae that grows in the lagoon. Give yourself five or six drops of it every morning, no more, in a glass of water. It’s strong stuff.” He studied her with a close, searching look. “The plant is full of potent alkaloids that could knock you for a loop. Just nibble one little frond of it and you’d be unconscious for a week. Or maybe forever. This is a highly diluted extract, but be careful with it anyway.”

“You had a little of it yourself, didn’t you, when we first came in here?”

So she’d been paying attention after all. Quick eyes, a sharp observer. Interesting.

“I get nervous too now and then,” Lawler said.

“Do I make you nervous?”

“All my patients do. I don’t really know much about medicine, and I’d hate them to find that out.” He forced a laugh. “No, that isn’t true. I don’t know as much about medicine as I should, but I know enough to manage. But I find that the drug calms me when I’m not having a good morning, and today didn’t start off particularly well for me. It had nothing to do with you. Here, you might as well take your first dose right now.”

He measured it out for her. She sipped carefully, uneasily, and made a wry face as the curious sweet taste of the alkaloids registered on her.

“You feel the effect?” Lawler asked.

“Right away! Hey, good stuff!”

“Too good, maybe. A little insidious.” He made notes on her dossier. “Five drops in a glass of water every morning, no more, and you don’t get a refill until the first of the month.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Her entire facial expression had changed; she looked much more relaxed now, the cool grey eyes warmer, almost twinkling, the lips not so tightly pursed, the tense cheek muscles allowed a little slack. She looked younger. She looked prettier. Lawler had never had a chance before to observe the effects of numbweed on anyone else. They were unexpectedly dramatic.

She said, “How did you discover this drug?”

“The Gillies use numbweed as a muscle relaxant when they’re hunting meatfish in the bay.”

“The Dwellers, you mean?”

The prissy correction caught Lawler by surprise. “Dwellers” was what the dominant native life-forms of Hydros called themselves. But “Gillies” was what anyone who had been on Hydros more than a few months called them, at least around here. Maybe the usage was different on the island where she was from, he thought, off in the Azure Sea. Or perhaps it was what the younger people were saying now. Usages changed. He reminded himself that he was ten years older than she was. But most likely she used the formal term out of respect, because she fancied herself as a student of Gillie culture. What the hell: whichever way she liked it, he’d try to be accommodating.