"Self-snuffers," Tarquin was telling Darby when the dead hospital PA chimed. "They can't live without 'em, so they want ones that'll take them down too. Take 'em into the system forever. Suicide vims. It's hotbiz, bubbeleh. Dunno if I can live without it."
Darby smeared another layer of viscous slime onto his encased arm. "Hang on to your ears, Tarq. It's gonna do it again."
"CERTAINTY FIDELITY ON THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT PASS LIKE VIBRATIONS OF A BELL AND FASHIONABLE MADMEN RAISE THEIR PEDANTIC BORING CRY"
A cry erupted from the admin cubicle, followed by the purple face of the admin himself. "I told you to wipe that thing!"
"Can't wipe it." The exhausted techie was hanging from a web belt hooked to the ceiling, where she'd opened a panel to reveal undulating holographic entrails. "I keep killing it, but it reroutes itself, and you can't pull the plug on these goddamn--"
"EVERY FARTHING OF THE COST ALL THE DREADED CARDS FORETELL SHALL BE PAID BUT FROM THIS NIGHT NOT A WHISPER NOT A THOUGHT NOT A KISS NOR LOOK BE"
The techie requested a baseball bat, and the admin's face abruptly withdrew.
A man lurched in through the ground-level doors cradling a small bundle in his arms. His blond hair was a wild tousle, his charcoal business outfit rumpled; he propelled himself toward the admissions desk so single-mindedly that the waiting crowd parted for him.
"Frankenstein," Tarquin said.
"You mean Frankenstein's monster," Darby replied.
He shook his head. "I don't think so."
The bundle was a little girl wrapped in a stained, floral-pattern sheet. Her face was dangerously pale; shock, Darby figured. She applied the last layer to the arm-chrysalis.
The desk clerk told the man to wait his turn. The man kicked the admissions console. "You must help us! You are a hospital, you are here to help! I cannot do for her anymore!"
Darby regarded with satisfaction the fractured ulna she had just set in Quikplast. She had only seen such things in stills, and was proud of creating one on her own.
"Trés raz," said Tarquin. He was looking at the angry father, not the cast.
"One of the interns'll get it," she replied, stripping off her gloves.
Someone handed an old claw hammer up to the techie. She hauled off and swung at the laser matrices above her. Metal and polymer shards rained down. The PA system gave an irate shriek and cut off.
"They're gonna give you the Frank, femmecheline," Tarquin said. "Mark my words. I got a schmeller for such things."
Darby shrugged. It was just another parent rendered hysterical by the wholesale loss of infrastructure at the moment a child fell ill.
"Meshugge chines," he said absently, mouth on autopilot. "Coulda fixed that bone for me in two shakes." He was absorbed by the fracas at the desk, his slit green eyes bright, nostrils flared as if downwind of a redolent opportunity.
"Arm's all done." Darby slapped his thighs with finality. "Gonna burn for about an hour while it cooks, but leave it alone and it'll set just fine."
"You're a mensch, Darb. I owe." He took such debts seriously; he stuck out his fawn-brown hand for her to shake. Then his eyes lit up. "Mira, chérie!"
His schmeller proved unerring: the desk attendant, having found no available MDs to look at the kid, called out to her.
"I should get a conveyor belt," she muttered.
"Get a manual one," Tarquin said with a wink. Then he was gone, melting into the sea of minor injuries--off to salvage what he could from the shattered pieces of his black market.
No more vim, Darby thought as she negotiated the ten-foot obstacle course to the irrelevant admissions console. No lush rainforest to go home to, no soft patter of droplets on verdant leaves, no twining lianas and dappled canopy to soothe this antiseptic place from her tired brain.
Unless you wanted one that would kill you.
People plucked at her white sleeves like pre-millennium beggars. As if a uniform, any uniform, could keep the eschaton at bay.
"Just set her here on the counter," Darby said, "Mister...?"
"Hans Gruiber is my name and this is my daughter Hannah, she must have an IV immediately--"
"Right here will be fine, sir, let's have a look." She was already probing for injuries, trying not to react as her hands found nothing but loose skin and undamaged but too-thin bones. With the sheet unwrapped, Hannah looked like a seven-year-old famine victim kept in a cave since birth--her limbs spindly, hairless, devoid of muscle, her flesh the dull pallor of death.
There were track marks all over her.
"Can you tell me what these are about?" Darby said.
He bared his teeth. "You think I drug her, but you're wrong. Why do they give me a nurse when I demand a doctor?"
"As you can see, all of our doctors are occupied." The child was unconscious, but there was no evident physical trauma. No blood, nothing broken, no bumps on the head. Her skin was warm and dry. Darby pulled her eyelids up; it felt like scrunching rosepetals under her fingertips, so fragile, as if the lids would rub right off. The pupils contracted equally in the light. "And you haven't answered my question."
"Put two and two together," he said. "I requested an IV for her."
"Can you just tell me what happened?" She checked vital signs with her ancient tools: stethoscope on chest, fingers on wrist. The prism scanners lay in a heap in the corner.
"No I cannot," he replied.
"Okay," she said, "why don't we start with how old she is."
"Eleven."
Eleven my ass. She was the size of a toddler.
"Nothing here indicates that she needs emergency treatment," Darby said. "What I see here looks more like gross negligence. Do you feed this child?"
Gruiber recoiled defensively. "She has had all required nutrients," he said. "She has lacked for nothing."
She was underdeveloped and her stomach cavity was sunken in. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyesockets twin bruises; her hair had been cropped short and bleached to the texture of straw, probably by insecticides.
"So you were feeding her with a drip," you insane, lazy bastard, "and when the chine flipped you came here. Take her home and give her some proper care, or give her to someone who can."
"She must have an IV. The machine is dead that provided it. I have no other equipment at home."
A stir of activity caught Darby's eye: medtechs racing down from the mag tower with three bloodsoaked bodies in immobilizers. Had they persuaded an ambulette to run on manual? A resident broke away to follow, but no one else.
Darby could wing anesthesiology better than any of the other humans on duty.
"I have to go," she said, one ear open for the medtech's report. "Your daughter does not need intravenous anything, Mr. Gruiber, she needs a bowl of soup. If she has suffered a nervous breakdown, take her to Arnheim."
"...pact, jumped out of a sixth-story window tied together..." the medtech was saying.
This was wartime. Casualties abounded--casualties they couldn't treat, because every piece of prism-reliant equipment they had was unusable. In a war--even if it was, like this, a war against madness, despair--you couldn't worry about the breakdowns. Not in a hospital that had regressed a century overnight. Not when it was more than you could do to put the bodies back together. The minds would have to wait.
She twisted her wrist out of Gruiber's desperate grip, disengaged herself from his invective, and walked into the OR to fight for the lives of three people who would rather be dead.
)
