SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

"Your patients will ask you if there is a cure," said the professor suddenly. The lecture had moved from luwuko, the art of diagnosis, to uganga—treatment. "There was none known to our ancestors, and none known to us. But there are palliatives. Your book describes several kinds of pills, and other remedies that are inhaled, and you will learn to compound them and what to watch for…"

Mutende listened with the other basambilila and dutifully wrote down lists of ingredients, the places where they could be bought or ordered, the steps that must be taken to prepare them. He knew them too, all of them, and at that moment, the classroom carried the memory of a butcher’s icebox much more than any of its other incarnations.

All the pills, all the rubs, all the vapors—they were the ones that did his landlady no good at all.

Mutende had an examination three hours after his class, and it was in another building across the Katwe near the old Mwata’s Gardens. That was far from the port district and he couldn’t afford a moto-taxi, so he had no time to go home between classes. He went anyway.

He lived on the edge of the port, in one of the three- and four-story houses that had been built in the interstices of ancient buildings. There were six of them in a row, with water-towers hanging precariously from the upper stories and clotheslines and crazy angles between them, and somehow they looked less solid than the remnants of steel girders that towered over them. There were market-stalls set up in the street, and men in sober agbadas and women in bright dresses and hair-ties swirled around them, but none tried to claim Mutende’s attention: anyone who wore a gray student’s robe and lived here was likely to be even poorer than his neighbors.

Mapalo, the landlady, lived in two rooms on the first floor. The outer one, where she slept, was decorated with masks and dolls from the north country where she came from; next to them, beside the sewing machine, was a picture of her husband who had traded between worlds. He was lost to pirates ten years past, but not before he’d picked up the ichiyawafu-fever from a prostitute in a distant port and brought it home to his wife.

She stirred when Mutende came in, and he helped her sit up and put a plate of lamb and a cup of shake-shake beer before her. The tip of his index finger touched her facial scars, shaped many years ago to suggest a bird’s wing: the sign of the Hornbill clan, one of the old clans that traced its ancestry to before the Migrations. His own face bore the same scars, and that was why she’d agreed to rent a room to him when he finished his fostering, but in the time since, she had become not only a clanswoman but a friend.

"How is it with you, mbuya?" he asked. She wasn’t his grandmother, but as an elder woman of his clan, she was entitled to the honorific, and now, as they said in the north, it was a heart-title as well.

"A little better," she answered. Mutende felt of her forehead and knew it was a lie. Her temperature was higher and her lesions hadn’t improved. He wasn’t sure if she’d lost more weight, but she certainly hadn’t gained any back, and this latest attack was taking vitality from her practically by the day.

"I made you something to reduce the fever," he said. He held a cup to her mouth, watched her drink, and pressed a wet cloth to her brow. He put the bottle down next to the half-full container of pills, the kind that the mukalamba had talked about in class. Mapalo had taken them religiously, and she was still getting worse.

"Can you make me a blue-leaf tisane too?" she asked. "The umulaye told me it would help against witchcraft."

Mutende fought hard not to sigh. Mapalo had found a street-doctor, no doubt one who was from the Kabwe country like she was, and he’d given her a folk remedy. Out in the countryside, many people still believed that imfwiti—witches—caused all sickness and death, and his landlady evidently thought a specific against them would do her more good than a treatment for her illness.

Maybe, Mutende thought ruefully, she was right.

He clapped once—it was a way of saying yes—and went to the kitchen. It was one of the hours when the power was on, so he could boil water in the hotpot, and he found some sprigs of blue-leaf in the herb cabinet. He made the infusion, and a smell like cinnamon and pepper filled the room. It would give Mapalo pleasure, if nothing else.

In a moment, she smelled it too. "Kaweme said that blue-leaf was one of the best cargoes he could carry. On one world, the awantu used it for money…"

She launched into a story of her husband’s exploits among the stars. Mutende brought the tisane to her and listened for a while, but her stories could go on for hours, and that was time he didn’t have.

"I’m sorry, mbuya," he said, "but I have to go to my test."

"Go! Go!" She waved a hand in dismissal. "You have to take your test. You can’t let me keep you."

He bowed his head and left the room. Barely an hour remained before the exam: he would have to take a moto-taxi or else run the whole way. He felt in his pocket and found a two-indalama coin and three half-ndalama pieces: if he didn’t eat lunch today, he had enough.

There were taxis by the market-stalls outside—there always were—and by instinct, the drivers knew when they were needed. Mutende bargained between two of them and, the contract made, sat behind the winning bidder and felt the wind in his face.

The examination room was in a very different part of the city: a place of gardens, public buildings, and stately homes, where the ancient structures had retained much of their glory. The people who lived here were imwinamulende or even imwinamishishi; there was power all the time and running water, as there had been in the days of the Union and as the government promised there would one day be again.

The moto-taxi stopped on one end of a plaza, near the House of Kingmakers and the Chamber of the Ifapemba. The building here had always been a hospital, and the testing room had always been an operating theater: inganga had labored to save Lukwesa the Great’s life here after his defense of the system, and Chinkonkole the Navigator’s crew had found treatment here for the maladies of a hundred distant worlds. This place was sacred to Eyinle, the orisha of medicine, and thus was it where oaths were made and tests were taken.

Mutende got to the testing ground barely five minutes before the appointed time. The preceptor was already waiting and registered him in the book: Mutende, second-year student, examination in surgery on the fourteenth day of the fifth month of the Year of Migration 31,779 .

At the word "surgery," Mutende’s foreboding suddenly turned to elation. He hadn’t been told in advance of the subject in which he would be tested, but this one, of all of them, he knew he could pass. The surgeons of today were as good as any of their ancestors—not everything had been forgotten when the Union fell, and tools had survived much better than burned books or plague-ravaged computers—and Mutende, with mechanic-trained hands, counted himself as good as any of his teachers.

Beyond the door, sanitized and dressed in sterile clothing, he saw the patient on whom he would be tested: a child of eight years, already anesthetized with drugs and needles and connected to fluids and plasma. He read through the records and films that the preceptor proffered, and saw that she had a brain tumor: a dangerous one that would surely kill her in a few months if left untreated. His elation wavered slightly—this was beyond the tests normally given to a student in his second or even third year, and the others in the room would intervene only to save the child’s life—but he found a calm place within and steeled himself to the work.