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

He checked his instruments, making sure each was sterile and sharp, and made the initial incision. He clamped down a flap of scalp and cut away a piece of the skull; he probed the membranes inside and opened them carefully. The brain was exposed, and behind him, the machine waited.

Mutende had used such machines before: he had trained with one until it was part of him. A movable arm protruding from the machine held tiny tools, and a light and camera so he could see what the tools saw; below was a seat and a sleeve with which he would manipulate the instruments. If he put his arm and hand in the sleeve and moved a centimeter, one of the tools could be set to move a hundredth or a thousandth of a centimeter or even less. A surgeon with a steel nerve could use the instruments with an almost incredibly fine touch: once, on a dare, Mutende had written his name on a single cell sampled from his skin without breaking the membrane.

He placed the end of the arm on the surface of the brain, took his seat, and put on the mask that connected him to the camera. He probed, looking for the tumor: time took on a dreamlike quality as he found it, excised it, and set his tools finer so that only the cancerous cells would be cut away. He probed again, looking for fragments that the imaging might have missed, keeping iron control of his movements lest he break a blood vessel. Finally—was it minutes later, or hours?—he was satisfied that the tumor was gone, and with a shock that was almost pain, he withdrew his instruments and returned to the real world.

The preceptor, and the other inganga who were watching, said nothing as he closed up the opening he had made. He would know whether he passed when they chose to tell him. But he trusted his eyes and his hands, and he knew the child would live.

He thought of his landlady, and wondered why fevers were so much more elusive.

In the morning, Mapalo was sweeping the downstairs hallway. She sang a north-country song as she worked, but her movements were slow and painful and her breathing labored.

"You should be in bed," Mutende said.

"Inchito talala tulo," she said—"the work doesn’t sleep." They said that in the Kabwe country, and they also said that about Hornbill clanswomen. Hornbills were supposed to work hard: that was as true as any other saying, but Mapalo had always taken it to heart.

"The work might not. But you’re sick. You should."

"What would I be if I did nothing but sleep? And I had another tisane this morning, and I felt better."

Mutende mentally cursed his landlady’s umulaye again, but then he stopped short. The other day, he’d learned that a substance distilled from the blue-leaf plant was used in drugs that strengthened the immune system, and didn’t they say that repeated attacks of ichiyawafu-fever eroded the victims' immunity? He’d been taught, long before medical school, that an umulaye was good only for stitching up cuts and easing women’s pains, but there was long experience in the street-doctors' fostering lines, and sometimes experience was wisdom…

"You should rest even if you feel better," he said, taking a different tack. "Get your strength back if you want to fight this attack off." He took care not to mention the next one.

"Don’t mind me, I can…" Mapalo’s voice trailed off, and Mutende turned to see her leaning heavily against a wall. She’d dropped the broom and was breathing very hard, and he had to catch her to keep her from sliding to the floor.

He helped her back to her rooms and, seeing no water in the jar, went out to pump her some. He made her drink and eat some of the nshima porridge that was on the stove, and after a few minutes her heart stopped racing and her breath came more evenly. He picked up the pill bottle and shook it, but then put it down: what good would it do?

"I forgot—there’s a message for you," she said suddenly. "You’re to be at the second-year offices at three o’clock."

Now Mutende did curse. He had no classes today, and he’d hoped to find some casual labor in the port, but not if he had to be across the city by three. He wondered why the summons had come: surely something hadn’t gone wrong after the examination…

He would worry about it, he knew. And he did worry, through five hours of fetching and carrying for the market-women, past the university and the derelict towers of the city center, all the way to the ancient factory of which the medical school now occupied two floors.

The professor was waiting by the door and conducted him to a back office. He took the chair that was offered and waited to hear why he had been summoned, but the professor seemed strangely diffident, in no hurry to speak. For a long moment, Mutende watched as the teacher busied himself around the office, straightening books and dusting sculptures.

Finally, the moment stretched on too long. "Mukalamba," he said, "have you called me here to talk about the test?"

The professor straightened, as if suddenly reminded that Mutende was there. "The test? Oh yes, you did well. The child will live long. But that isn’t why I asked you to come here. The other bakalamba and I are concerned about you as a student."

Whatever Mutende had expected, it wasn’t this. "Have I failed in anything?" he asked.

"No, there is no single thing. But we have noticed an…irreverence in you. Of late, you have seemed uninterested during lectures, and when the gods of healing were invoked, you have been detached, preoccupied with other things. This is not a correct attitude for a musambilila who wants to qualify as a doctor."

Mutende’s first instinct was to be defensive, to say that the gods of medicine weren’t his gods. The orishas weren’t the original gods of Mutanda: they had come in the ancient days of the Association and the Accord, but there were still people in the far north and west who rejected them. But he swallowed the words. He wasn’t a mountain man or an islander; his family had lived in Chambishi Port since the days of the Union rather than being among the latecomers who flocked to the city as it rebuilt its factories. He had been raised with the orishas, although he’d come to doubt them, and if he said otherwise, the mukalamba would know it was a lie.

"The orishas have not protected my landlady," he said instead.

The professor looked at him sharply. "How have they failed her?"

"All of us have failed her. She has the ichiyawafu-fever, and the pills and remedies in the Book of Maladies —none of them have worked."

"Ah," the mukalamba said. He was on familiar ground now. "I have seen many students with your doubt. You must understand that nothing ever works in all cases…your landlady’s husband was a free trader, was he not?"

"Yes," Mutende answered, too surprised by the sudden shift in questioning to say anything more.

"You have learned that pathogens evolve…good, good. The remedies we have were created in the ancestors' days, the days of the Union, and some strains of the ichiyawafu-fever have evolved to resist them. Much was lost when the Union fell, and many worlds fell out of communication, and in centuries without contact, their illnesses changed."

Mutende felt a sudden epiphany: the professor had never examined his landlady, but he was sure that his luwuko was true, and he cursed himself for not thinking of it before. "Why don’t we look for remedies that do work, then? Why don’t we find out what might kill the new pathogens?"

"That would be foolish, wouldn’t it?" The professor spoke as if his words should be self-evident even to a child. "We haven’t yet learned everything the ancestors knew—it would be dangerous to try to go beyond them."

It seemed to Mutende that there was something wrong with the mukalamba’s premise, but in his confusion, he couldn’t put a finger on what it was. "What are we doing, then, to learn all that the Union knew?"